Canadian company seeks US permission to start deep-sea mining as outcry ensues

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — (AP) — An abrupt announcement rattled members of a little-known U.N. agency based in Jamaica that has protected international deep-sea waters for more than 30 years.

The Metals Company in Vancouver, Canada said late Thursday that it is seeking permission from the U.S. government to start deep-sea mining in international waters, potentially bypassing the International Seabed Authority, which has the power to authorize exploitation permits but has yet to do so.

“It would be a major breach of international law…if the U.S. were to grant it,” said Duncan Currie, an international and environmental lawyer and legal adviser to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, a Netherlands-based alliance of environmental groups.

The Metals Company seeks seafloor minerals like cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese used in electric car batteries and other green technology.

The announcement was made just hours before the 36-member council of the International Seabed Authority met in Jamaica on Friday, the last day of a two-week conference focused on how and if to allow deep-sea mining, a years-long debate.

The authority was scheduled to talk Friday about the company’s commercial mining application.

“The scale of the threat…has been taken incredibly seriously here,” said Louisa Casson, a campaigner at Greenpeace who attended Friday's meeting. “There are questions and a lack of clarity of what they actually plan on doing.”

She said one question is whether the company plans to request a permit anyway from the authority even as it continues talks with the U.S. government.

Currie said the timing of The Metals Company’s announcement was “insulting to the ISA.”

“It’s an extremely irresponsible threat. It’s basically holding a gun to the international community,” he said.

The International Seabed Authority was created in 1994 by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is ratified by more than 165 nations — but not the United States.

The Metals Company argued that the United States’ seabed mining code would allow it to start operations in international waters since it's not a member of the authority and therefore not bound by its rules.

The company said it was already in discussions with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among others.

“We have met with numerous officials in the White House as well as U.S. Congress regarding their support for this industry,” the company said in a statement.

NOAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Metals Company criticized what it said was “slow progress” by the International Seabed Authority on a proposed mining code that has yet to be finalized.

The authority has issued more than 30 exploration licenses but no provisional licenses.

Most of the current exploration is happening in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, which covers 1.7 million square miles (4.5 million square kilometers) between Hawaii and Mexico. It is occurring at depths ranging from 13,000 to 19,000 feet (4,000 to 6,000 meters).

More than 30 countries including Canada have called for a ban, pause or moratorium on deep-sea mining, and companies including Volvo, BMW, Volkswagen, Google and Samsung have pledged not to use seafloor minerals.

“The international seabed is the common heritage of humankind, and no state should take unilateral action to exploit it,” Greenpeace said in a statement.

Scientists have warned that minerals in the ocean's bowels take millions of years to form, and that mining could unleash noise, light and suffocating dust storms.

“The deep ocean is one of the last truly wild places on Earth, home to life we’re only beginning to understand. Letting deep-sea mining go forward now would be like starting a fire in a library of books nobody’s even read yet," said Emily Jeffers, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

However, companies have argued that deep-sea mining is cheaper and has less of an impact than land mining.