🌊Good update on the critical metals resting on the deep seabed
TLDR; “Who extracts these minerals will determine more about the next century than most of the decisions being made in Washington… The floor of the Pacific is the last great untapped resource extraction prize on Earth.”
Excerpts: “The target for this mining is a 104.5 million acre stretch of seabed between Mexico and Hawaii known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), where US Geological Survey estimates suggest deposits contain more nickel, cobalt, and manganese than all known worldwide land-based reserves combined. The full CCZ is estimated to contain up to 30 billion metric tons of nodules — a deposit, at current valuations, worth up to $18.4 trillion.
Critical minerals demand is accelerating beyond what the existing supply system was designed to handle. By 2035, EVs could account for as much as 70% of global new car sales. The critical minerals supply system has no plausible path to keeping pace.
In the US alone there are 570 gigawatts of battery storage projects waiting to be added to the grid. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has projected that demand for battery metals could grow by a factor of 30x by 2040 from 2024 levels.
Battery storage costs will fall another 35–55% by 2035. At that level, the economic case for new gas-fired power plants collapses because storage can undercut gas on price while performing the same grid-balancing function. But this plummeting cost curve assumes a steady flow of raw materials, an assumption that currently rests on shaky ground.
The biggest risk to this energy transition is a lack of mines. The IEA estimates the world needs 80 new copper mines, 70 new lithium mines, and 70 new nickel mines to meet projected demand. Historically new copper mines take 15-20 years or longer to come online. Closing this gap through conventional mining alone is functionally impossible.
The structural supply shortage of the materials we need to electrify our economies will redraw the map of global power. Instead of Saudi Arabia and other petrostates holding the world politically hostage, power could shift to what we might call electrostates that possess or control the critical minerals needed for electrification.
The largest electrostate is China. Chinese companies control significant shares of global cobalt and manganese extraction in Africa and elsewhere and have locked up supply through overseas mining investments as part of a deliberate industrial strategy. China is the dominant refiner for 19 of the 20 minerals analyzed in the IEA’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025. The country manufactures more than 80% of the world’s finished batteries and controls over 98% of lithium iron phosphate battery cell production.
What [Metals Company CEO] Barron was offering President Trump, in his own words, was “an amazing way of catching up from what is a very distant second place to China when it comes to critical minerals.” Four days after that Oval Office meeting, Trump signed an executive order directing the US government to expedite seabed mining licenses in international waters...
Any environmental concerns must be balanced with the reality that open-pit mining is more ecologically destructive than the methods proposed by Western deep-sea mining companies; open-pit mining projects are mostly located in countries with weaker environmental protections than the international frameworks governing the CCZ. The relevant comparison here is between different forms of mineral extraction, because extraction is necessary and environmental costs can only be mitigated, not eliminated.
The Metals Company’s PATANIA III collector vehicle uses hydraulic suction to skim nodules from the seafloor rather than the bulldozing motion of earlier prototypes, reducing sediment disturbance by roughly 90%.
‘Copper is the new oil,’ according to Robert Friedland, a legendary mining industry figure and one of the first investors in Apple. Copper is why the economics of deep-sea mining are becoming newly compelling. Copper has no real substitute. It’s also embedded in virtually every system that carries an electrical current.
China reversed course on deep-sea mining, a position it had resisted for decades. Beijing’s calculation had changed because land-based mineral strategies in Africa were proving expensive, politically unstable, and increasingly exposed. China now holds more deep-sea exploration licenses than any other country and has built a large fleet of research and survey vessels operating across the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The appeal of deep-sea mining to China, which prizes self-sufficiency above all else, is apparent. The ocean asks nothing of you. Unlike developing nations, the ocean won’t attempt to nationalize your assets or default on a loan or hold elections with unpredictable consequences for your investments.
In the March 2026 issue of Qiushi, the Chinese Communist Party’s top theoretical journal, an editorial declared 'The 21st century is the century of the ocean; whoever wins the ocean wins the future. China is one of the earliest nations in the world to develop and utilize the ocean ... We must deeply implement Xi Jinping’s vision to build a maritime power.'
If the Chinese pursue deep-sea mining as part of an integrated strategy to control the world’s oceans, the US must treat it as a mandatory theatre of competition. The Trump administration is pushing forward. NOAA and the Bureau of Ocean Management are accelerating permitting. In late March, the US and Japan signed a memorandum of cooperation to jointly advance deep-sea mining.
Who extracts these minerals, and under what legal framework, will determine more about the next century than most of the decisions being made in Washington right now. A CCZ developed under American legal frameworks produces a different world than one developed under Chinese state direction, with output flowing into Chinese refineries, Chinese battery factories, and Chinese defense supply chains.
The floor of the Pacific is the last great untapped resource extraction prize on Earth.”
— From: https://arenamag.com/articles/treasure-hunting $TMC
