Updated September 2026.
Batteries, wind turbines and power lines need huge amounts of nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese. Scattered across parts of the deep Pacific floor, three to six kilometers down, lie trillions of potato-sized “polymetallic nodules” rich in exactly those metals. Whether to mine them has become one of the most heated arguments in the energy transition.
The case for
- Big, high-grade deposits. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, between Hawaii and Mexico, holds more of some battery metals than all known land reserves.
- Less dependence on a few countries. Today, processing of many critical minerals is dominated by China. See The Changing Geopolitics of Renewables.
- No forests cleared and no communities displaced, unlike some land mines, for example nickel mining in Indonesia.
The case against
- We barely know these ecosystems. Most species collected in the deep Pacific are new to science. Nodules take millions of years to form, and they are themselves habitat. Test mining decades ago left tracks that still hadn’t recovered years later.
- Sediment plumes and noise could spread impacts far beyond the mined area.
- The need may shrink. Battery makers are moving to cobalt- and nickel-free chemistries (LFP and sodium-ion), and recycling is growing.
- Pushback. More than 30 countries have called for a pause or moratorium, and several major automakers and tech companies have pledged not to use seabed metals.
Who decides?
For international waters, the UN-affiliated International Seabed Authority (ISA) has granted exploration contracts, but it has still not agreed on a “mining code” to allow commercial extraction. Talks in 2025 and March 2026 ended without one.
The United States, which never ratified the Law of the Sea treaty, has taken a different route. After a 2025 executive order, NOAA revised its rules under a 1980 US law, and The Metals Company applied for a US commercial recovery permit covering about 65,000 km² of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. NOAA opened a public comment period in August 2026, with a public hearing scheduled for mid-October. The move is controversial internationally.
Within their own waters, countries can decide for themselves. The Cook Islands is exploring nodules in its exclusive economic zone, and Norway approved opening areas for exploration before pausing the process.
Past attempts
The first serious commercial venture, Nautilus Minerals’ Solwara 1 project to mine seafloor sulfide deposits off Papua New Guinea, collapsed. Nautilus went bankrupt in 2019 without ever mining. The Metals Company (formerly DeepGreen) has since become the most prominent would-be miner.
