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The Trump administration is considering whether to permit a mining project at the bottom of the Pacific. The plan involves a new way of extracting minerals used in defense and energy technologies. Daniel Ackerman reports on the company behind it and the questions the project is raising.
DANIEL ACKERMAN, BYLINE: The idea for deep-sea mining has been around for a while. Take it from this very 1980s documentary.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: The sea - a new reserve of global resources.
ACKERMAN: That's an educational film by Allegro Productions. The ocean floor holds a lot of metal. That includes nickel and cobalt, used in technology like electric cars, and those metals are bound up in these strange-looking rocks called polymetallic nodules.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Potato-sized objects covering thousands of square miles of sea bottom.
ACKERMAN: But those potato-sized nodules have never been mined. Now a startup called The Metals Company wants to be the first. CEO Gerard Barron says those nodules are just waiting.
GERARD BARRON: They literally sit there like golf balls on a driving range. We can pick those nodules up and turn them into metals at a fraction of the environmental and human impacts compared to land-based mining.
ACKERMAN: Barron is a serial entrepreneur from Australia. He's done everything from software to manufacturing to finance. But since he became head of The Metals Company in 2017, Barron has been laser-focused on deep-sea mining. His firm has developed technology - something like a giant remote-controlled vacuum cleaner - to suck up nodules off the seabed. It wants to use that vacuum in a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean. He says mining there means you don't have to clear-cut a rainforest or displace communities, like you might on land.
BARRON: This is the perfect place. There's no alternative for this part of the sea floor. You can't grow crops there. People can't live there. It's perfect.
ACKERMAN: But not everyone agrees. Sheryl Murdock is an oceanographer at Arizona State University. She says mining beneath miles of seawater would just hide the impacts.
SHERYL MURDOCK: On land, we all see how destructive mining is. But on the sea floor, no one's going to see it. So I don't think it's going to be less destructive. It's that people are going to be less aware of it.
ACKERMAN: Some analysts have also questioned the business case for deep-sea mining. Many EV carmakers have shifted away from using nickel and cobalt, and right now there's a global oversupply of those metals. Even some terrestrial mines are going idle. But Dan Ives, a tech analyst at Wedbush Securities, says the outlook for deep-sea mining improved this past April with a stroke of Donald Trump's pen.
DAN IVES: I'd say the industry got a lifeline with the Trump executive order. That's what changed everything.
ACKERMAN: The order called on the U.S. government to fast-track deep-sea mining in both federal and international waters. And that puts the U.S. at odds with nearly every other country on Earth.
LETICIA CARVALHO: The area is in international possession.
ACKERMAN: Leticia Carvalho is secretary-general of the International Seabed Authority. That's the body recognized by more than 160 countries that regulates the deep sea beyond national control, including the part of the Pacific where The Metals Company wants to mine. Carvalho says those minerals belong to all humans.
CARVALHO: Therefore, any activity without an authorization of the International Seabed Authority constitutes a violation of the international law.
ACKERMAN: But the Trump administration says it's not bound by that law. The U.S. never ratified the underlying treaty. And Trump says the U.S. needs its own supply of critical minerals because global supplies are now dominated by China. Barron plans to seize this new political opportunity. He says The Metals Company is ready to start mining nodules while Trump is still in office, even though other countries say they're not America's minerals to mine.
For NPR News, I'm Daniel Ackerman.
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