Trump's Plan for Pirate Mining

Another bad idea made for grifters

On April 24, among a plethora of Executive Orders, many of questionable legality, President Trump issued one calling for deep-sea mining in both federal and international waters. The later idea of course, as China was quick to point out, is in violation of international law. Although the U.S. is not a signatory to the Law of the Seas convention that regulates global maritime activities including deep-sea mining, the U.S. has abided by it since its establishment in 1982. Every administration until this one has also tried to get the U.S. Senate to ratify it with the backing of almost all U.S. maritime interests from the Navy to the shipping industry to Greenpeace. Many years ago, when I asked the Legislative Director for the late Jesse Helms (R - NC) chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time why he wouldn’t bring the treaty up for a vote, he said, “My boss just doesn’t believe we should be part of any agreement where the U.S. vote doesn’t count more than anyone else’s.” Helms was MAGA before there was MAGA.

I did my first article on deep-sea mining in 1977 because bad ideas that promise quick profits never get old. At the time the first global consortiums of mining companies had formed to go after mineral-rich manganese nodules scattered across much of the deep ocean floor. The nodules form around a hard nucleus, such as a grain of sand or a shark’s tooth, accumulating minerals out of seawater and sediment over millions of years.

Given the limits of technology at the time, those nodules, shaped like walnuts cobbling the sea floor 2.5 to 3.5 miles down, proved commercially inaccessible. Today, however, tech-driven corporations, such as The Metals Company (TMC) of Canada, whose CEO recently visited the White House to lobby for U.S. involvement, are leading the way back into the deep. With massive mother ships that use 40-foot tank-tread robot collectors (essentially, underwater bulldozers) plus thousands of feet of power cable, vacuum and riser systems they’ve begun test runs in the Pacific. TMC has recovered 4,500 tons of nodules. It’s also now formally applied to NOAA for commercial mining permits for its U.S. subsidiary.

In 1960, the late U.S. Navy Captain Don Walsh was one of the first two humans to reach the deepest part of the ocean, called the “Challenger Deep,” along with Jacques Piccard, who piloted their Bathysphere, ‘Trieste.’ I was curious to get this American hero’s thoughts on the expansion of mining.

“It’s kind of like clear-cutting the forest,” Walsh told me two years ago before he passed. “It doesn’t differentiate between the ore and the things that live on the seafloor. And these are organisms that take thousands of years to populate an area. So, I can’t support awarding mining permissions or licenses to areas that have not been carefully studied.”

He wasn’t alone in that assessment. More than 1,000 marine scientists and policy experts from 70 nations have signed a letter urging the United Nations to hold off on licensing mining operations “that could result in the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.” What we don’t know about the deep ocean is astonishing. Just last year a report in the prestigious scientific journal Nature found that the nodule covered seafloor in the 1.7 million square mile Clarion-Clipperton zone of the Pacific that’s slated for mining is producing “dark oxygen” possibly through some form of seawater electrolysis interacting with the mineralized nodules. This has generated a huge stir positing new concepts about how oxygen is created. And there are other concerns.

“If you’re constantly stirring up sediments (while mining), there is a school of thought that says you may be reintroducing that carbon back into the water column — and then ultimately back into the atmosphere,” former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad cautioned me back when he ran the agency, a sharp contrast with the latest fawning press release from NOAA – “The next gold rush’: President Trump unlocks access to critical deep seabed minerals – Historic executive order will boost economic growth, support national security.”

TMC and others like to argue that mining the deep ocean is also a climate solution. Mining manganese nodules that are also rich in copper, nickel and cobalt could help enable the shift to battery-powered clean energy and electric vehicles they claim. “You’ve got to have a planetary perspective,” TMC’s Chief Scientist Greg Stone says and who can argue with the environmental credentials of the mining industry?

France and New Zealand have called for a ban on deep-sea mining until the world’s largest habitat is better understood. Corporate customers including Volkswagen, Google, Samsung, Philips, Volvo and BMW have also pledged to keep deep sea minerals out of their electric cars and other products.

The United States during the Biden administration also supported a take it slow approach. Deep sea mining “is not ready for prime time,” Monica Medina, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs told me two years ago. Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now eliminated that position.

China and India, among other countries, when not taking the U.S. to task, have shown keen interest in quickly bringing mining operations to the planet’s last physical frontier. And the U.N.’s International Seabed Authority has announced that, at the request of the tiny Pacific Island nation of Nauru, which has a contract with TMC, it will soon begin issuing commercial licenses for deep sea mining.

Of course, the U.S., under Trump’s executive order, can and probably will ignore those licenses provoking new global tensions and suggesting that when it comes to activities on or below the high seas the U.S. may prove to be the world’s newest pirate threat.