The Trump administration’s unilateral push to fast-track deep-sea mining has met fierce global opposition—framing the move as a threat to international law and ocean governance.

KINGSTON, Jamaica — The Trump administration is on a rogue quest to mine critical minerals from the ocean floor — and recent global negotiations over the fate of deep-sea mining reveal just how alone the U.S. is on the issue.

The deep-sea treasure that the administration seeks are lumpy, potato-sized rocks known as polymetallic nodules. They litter the mucky bottom of deep ocean areas across the planet. But in the 1970s, companies discovered that nodules in remote stretches of the Pacific Ocean contain high concentrations of several critical minerals, including many used today to make the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles.

Most of the world’s high-value nodules are found in international waters located between Hawaii and Mexico. Since 1994, when the United Nations Law of the Sea treaty went into effect, diplomats from most of the world’s countries have met annually to negotiate if and how to allow companies to extract those nodules for profit. No large-scale mining has yet taken place.

Last month, delegates from France, Russia, China, and most of the world’s other major economies gathered to continue those negotiations in a conference center in Kingston, Jamaica, overlooking the city’s turquoise coastal waters. The U.S., which is the only major country that hasn’t ratified the 1994 treaty, participated as an ​“observer.”

During the negotiations, run by the United Nations affiliate known as the International Seabed Authority, little progress was made on the specific task at hand: finalizing a code that would permit commercial mining on the high seas under the Law of the Sea.

Instead, during the two final days, the high-stakes deep-sea mining talks devolved into a public airing of grievances against the United States — including by several of the country’s allies, who, in an unusual move, have started to align more with China over the U.S. in the increasingly contentious fight.

That’s because President Donald Trump has been pushing the U.S. to barrel ahead on deep-sea mining. The country plans to permit mining in international waters under an obscure U.S. law from 1980 called the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, which predates the Law of the Sea treaty. Congress wrote the law to serve as an ​“interim legal regime” — a temporary way to grant mining licenses until the United Nations-affiliated regime took shape.

Many legal experts worry that invoking the antiquated act now is a violation of international law.

For years, a handful of private firms have pushed the international community to green-light deep-sea mining, which they argue offers a less environmentally destructive path than land-based mining for acquiring the metals needed for the clean-energy transition. Scientists, environmental advocates, and others, meanwhile, have fiercely criticized the idea, calling into question the claim that deep-sea mining is the lesser of two evils — or even an economically feasible enterprise.

The Trump administration’s new push to unilaterally license mining was seen as a slap in the face to the dozens of countries meeting in Jamaica last month. Delegates emphasized that the International Seabed Authority is the only entity legally authorized to permit mining in ocean areas that lie beyond nations’ jurisdictions.

A main point of contention is that, according to the U.N. treaty, the international seabed is designated the ​“common heritage of mankind.” In other words, the nodules legally belong to all people living on Earth today as well as future generations. The treaty declares that any profits from exploiting that heritage be distributed across nations, not just reaped by one country, in a benefits-sharing agreement that treaty signatories are still hashing out.

“The ocean is not there to affirm the leadership of a single country at the expense of all others and the multilateral process,” boomed Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, France’s special envoy of the president for the ocean and poles, in a statement read on July 21, kicking off the final week of negotiations. 

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy-supply-chain/trump-deep-sea-mining-un-negotiations