US opens vast Pacific seabed to mining

Washington is planning to auction off deep-sea mining leases near the Northern Mariana Islands later this year, advancing the Trump administration’s push to develop domestic sources of critical minerals from the ocean floor.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on Monday issued a Proposed Leasing Notice for a potential mineral lease sale in federal waters offshore the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI).

The area covers about 271,000 sq. km of seabed east and west ​of the U.S. Pacific territory, which sits about 2,400 km east of the Philippines. It includes abyssal plains, seamounts and underwater volcanic mountains, with water depths ranging from 1,130 to 7,650 metres.

The proposed sale would be a key step for an industry that has yet to begin commercial-scale deep-sea mining anywhere in the world. The U.S. Department of the Interior has identified the CNMI as one of several areas where it could hold offshore critical-mineral lease sales as Washington seeks to reduce reliance on foreign mineral supplies.

“Critical minerals are essential to America’s national security, economic strength and resource sovereignty,” Matt Giacona, acting director of the U.S. Marine Minerals Administration (MMA), said in a statement. “The United States cannot afford to depend on foreign nations for the resources that power our economy and support our defense industrial base. The Marine Minerals Administration is working to unlock the critical mineral potential of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf responsibly, transparently and with the rigorous environmental review the American people expect.”

Polymetallic nodules

The area near the Mariana Islands contains several types of seabed mineral deposits. BOEM’s earlier work identified potential polymetallic nodules and ferromanganese crusts, with possible commercially valuable concentrations of cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese, zinc and rare earth elements, among other minerals.

Issuance of the proposed leasing notice doesn’t necessarily mean that a lease sale will be held, the MMA said. If it does decide to move forward with a sale, the agency will publish a Final Leasing Notice in the U.S. Federal Register at least 30 days before the sale date.

The sale is scheduled for Dec. 16. Leases would have a 20-year term.

Last month, the Trump administration proposed leasing more than 125,000 sq. km of seabed off American Samoa for deep-sea mining.

Swift criticism

Reaction from environmental organizations to Monday’s announcement was swift and furious.

“It’s disgraceful that the Trump administration is bulldozing ahead with plans to allow deep-sea mining while the people who live closest to the proposed project are rightfully demanding that it be stopped,” Nick Katkevich, an oceans campaigner at the Tucson, Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, said in an e-mailed statement.

“Deep-sea mining will be catastrophic for most of the mollusks on the ocean floor, along with all kinds of other creatures. These massive mining projects are just too experimental and dangerous for marine life to allow them to go forward.”

Existential threat

Sixty-two percent of the rare mollusc species living around deep-sea hydrothermal vents face extinction from proposed seabed mining, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said last month.

Some 125 of the 201 known vent-dwelling mollusc species are now listed as threatened because mining for critical minerals such as copper, cobalt and zinc would blanket fragile ecosystems with sediment and destroy habitats, the IUCN, the global scientific authority on the status of species, said July 9.

More than 200 mollusc species are known to live exclusively around hydrothermal vents, where water heated by volcanic rock can reach 450°C before jetting through the seabed. Many have been discovered only within the past decade and exist nowhere else on Earth.