Trump's lunge for critical metals could come at a huge environmental cost by churning up the seabed

Globe and Mail

23-05-2025

The Metals Company, a Canadian deep-sea minerals exploration business that trades on Nasdaq, was a penny stock in December. Today, its shares are worth about US$4.40 apiece, giving it a market value of US$1.6-billion even though it has no profits.
What happened? Donald Trump is what happened.
By now we know that the U.S. President is obsessed with 'critical' minerals, a catch-all term that is generally defined as those minerals considered essential for the latest technologies, among them cobalt for electric-vehicle batteries, gallium for LED lights, and rare earth metals for guided missiles.
Mr. Trump knows that China has pretty much locked up the global market for these minerals, including the smelters that cast them into usable products. His 'minerals deal' with Ukraine, signed in April, was billed as a critical metals triumph but seemed more about exploiting fairly abundant metals such as titanium, lithium and graphite that you can find pretty much anywhere, plus resources such as oil, natural gas and coal that are a glut on the market. (The U.S. Geological Survey does not list Ukraine as having any rare earths, a subset of critical minerals).
So Mr. Trump's hunt for the most critical of critical metals continued and, for that, he put on his metaphoric bathing trunks, grabbed a scuba tank and plunged underwater. There, at the bottom of the ocean, lay vast tracts of polymetallic nodules the size of potatoes that are stuffed with nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese. But how to extract them from international waters?
No problem. He bypassed the United Nations-mandated International Seabed Authority (ISA), which was established in the 1980s under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. The ISA, which has legal authority over seabed resources, has issued a few exploration licences but no commercial licences to churn up the seabed and squirt the nodules to the surface. The United States is one of the few countries that is not a member of the ISA but is described by it as a 'reliable observer and significant contributor to the negotiations' of the agency.
Mr. Trump's workaround took the form of an executive order last month that saw him direct the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with the U.S.'s Deep Seabed Hard Resources Minerals Resources Act at its side, to grant permits to mining companies to operate in both international and U.S. waters. The ISA objected but was ignored by the White House.
The Metals Company, which had lobbied the Trump administration to grant deep-sea mining rights, cheered and submitted applications for two exploration licences and one commercial recovery permit. They will cover a portion of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone – a seabed plain that spans 4.5 million square kilometres between Hawaii and Mexico. The company's shares soared.
In a statement, the Metals Company said it believed its exploration areas contained 15.5 million tonnes of nickel, 12.8 million tonnes of copper, two million tonnes of cobalt and 35 million tonnes of manganese. Gerard Barron, chairman and CEO, said the application for the permits 'marks a major step forward … for America's mineral independence and industrial resurgence.'
What is equally true is that it marks a potential major step backward for the health of the oceans. The deep-ocean depths are largely unexplored; they are among the last virgin wildernesses on the planet. Scientists have not catalogued many of the otherworldly creatures found in the cold, dark depths. Recent deep dives with robotic submarines have found what the BBC called a 'living constellation' of animals, from organisms flashing with bioluminescence to a 'walking' fish – actually a sea toad – with googly eyes, bright-red spiky skin and sturdy fins that allow it to crawl on the sea floor.
How would these creatures, and thousands of other species, survive the enormous tank-like machines – the biggest weigh about 300 tonnes – that would grind their way along the seabed to scoop up the nodules and shoot them along tubes to the surface? They probably wouldn't. Scientists have warned about noise and light pollution from the machines, sediment plumes from the grinding action, loss of biodiversity, and the release of massive amounts of carbon from the ocean floor.
Some 700 marine scientists have signed a petition calling for a 'pause' in the rush to mine the seas until the extent of the environmental damage can be determined. David Attenborough, the English broadcaster and biologist, has urged governments to ban deep-sea mining. A 2023 study by Fauna and Flora International warned that churning up the seabed could cause significant loss of biodiversity and the microbes that store carbon.
Batteries for EVs, phones and other products are driving the rush to find critical metals. The demand for batteries is rising fast as the internal combustion engine retreats from the car market. The 'green' transition is laying waste to entire landscapes, from the Indonesian rainforests, where nickel mines are proliferating, to the carbon sinks of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the source of most of the world's cobalt. Strip-mining the oceans is now almost certainly next and could go down as Mr. Trump's darkest legacy.