More than 2 miles deep in the Pacific Ocean and hundreds of miles off the coast between Mexico and Hawaii, trillions of lumpy, potato-sized, metal-rich nuggets lie scattered across the seafloor, a treasure hoard so valuable to clean-energy goals that the world’s powers are jostling to be first to mine it.
Scientists and environmentalists say extractive incursions into the area called the Clarion Clipperton Zone — a deep-sea region nearly half the size of the U.S. — threaten more than 5,000 seafloor animal species, along with fish, whales, dolphins and other marine life.
But a deep-sea mining company backed and advised by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist is now leading the race to the prized “polymetallic nodules” that nestle atop deep sediment drifts.
The Metals Company, based in Canada, created a U.S. subsidiary to mine Clarion Clipperton, and received a major boost in April when President Donald Trump issued an executive order asserting America’s right to mine beneath the ocean wherever it chooses.
“Vast offshore seabed areas hold critical minerals and energy resources … key to strengthening our economy, securing our energy future, and reducing dependence on foreign suppliers,” said the order, which specifically mentioned polymetallic nodules.
The scramble for ocean metals has dramatically accelerated amid exploding demand for batteries, necessary to electrify the world’s power supplies through renewable energies such as solar and wind power.
Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures in Los Altos, has personally invested $5 million in The Metals Company, where he also is vice-chairman of the board and special adviser to its CEO. The company’s stock on the Nasdaq exchange has more than tripled in value since Trump’s order.
Days after the order, The Metals Company USA applied for a permit from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to mine about 10,000 square miles of ocean floor for the nodules containing cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese. The company is also requesting permits to explore a 77,000-square-mile area it believes contains such nodules, with millions of tons of cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese.
“NOAA has been very fast in turning around the regulatory submissions,” Jurvetson said. The company’s permit applications are under review.
Legal obstacles The Metals Company may face remain uncertain. Several nations have banned deep sea mining in their waters, which extend out about 200 miles for countries, and many others have supported bans or pauses for their own or international waters. California also has banned deep sea mining in its waters, which extend out about 3.5 miles.
“It’s really unclear right now whether the United States has legal authority to do this, to issue these permits,” said UC Berkeley law school professor Holly Doremus, co-director of the school’s Law of the Sea Institute.
Jurvetson sees undersea mining as key to the crucial transition to electrical power from climate-cooking fossil fuels, a change requiring vast quantities of metals like nickel and cobalt to build batteries. Sucking ore from 13,000 to 20,000 feet deep in the ocean is far better for the planet than digging it from land, Jurvetson contended.
“This might be the most environmentally benign way to extract metals that we’ve ever had,” Jurvetson said.
However, many environmentalists and scientists see the project Jurvetson helps lead as reckless and unjustifiable.
Stephen Haddock, a Monterey Bay Research Institute scientist who studies deep sea and open-ocean creatures, described Jurvetson’s argument as “greenwashing” and the plan to mine the seafloor a looming catastrophe for ocean life that will not replace mining on land.
“We were just dreading it happening,” Haddock said. “It’s not to save the environment. It’s just for them to make a bunch of money. It’s part of our global heritage and they’re exploiting it for their own gain.”
The U.S. is among just over a dozen countries that are not party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which governs use of the ocean and its floor in areas beyond individual countries’ jurisdiction. The U.S. has long claimed the right to eventually harvest undersea ore outside the approximately 200 miles its authority extends from the coasts.
The UN’s International Seabed Authority has approved 19 contracts for polymetallic nodule exploration, mostly in the Clarion Clipperton, to China, Korea, India and Japan, along with private companies.
To obtain nodules, as it has in test explorations, The Metals Company deploys an underwater robot with tank-like treads to crawl the seafloor, using jets of water to dislodge nodules, then suck them up and send them clanking to the surface in a steel pipe.
“Picking up polymetallic nodules off the bottom of the sea without having to dig — is that mining?” Jurvetson asked.
At the sea bottom in Clarion Clipperton, expeditions have recorded more than 5,000 animal species. There are abyssal grenadier fish, faceless cusk-eels, “gummy squirrel” sea cucumbers, starfish, corals, sponges — including one that dwells on the nodules — crustaceans, mollusks, worms and tiny animals called kinorhynchs and loriciferans. Research led by the Natural History Museum in London suggests thousands more species in the area remain undiscovered.
Greenpeace, whose activists in 2023 boarded The Metals Company’s exploration vessel above Clarion Clipperton and occupied a crane for five days, has warned that noise and spreading silt from deep-sea mining pose severe threats to marine animals and delicate food webs, from species at the bottom to plankton, fish larvae, and dolphins and whales reliant on sound to forage, communicate and navigate.
“Deep sea mining is a gamble with our planet’s last untouched wilderness, threatening irreversible damage to ecosystems we barely understand,” Greenpeace oceans campaigner Jackie Dragon said.
While polymetallic nodules exist in other areas, they mostly lack sufficient metals to make mining worthwhile, The Metals Company’s CEO Gerard Barron said.
After visiting the White House late last month, he also referenced geopolitical strategy.
Much of the world’s nickel and cobalt mining is controlled by China and Russia and “if you have a disagreement with your trade partners, let’s say China and Russia, all the sudden you realize without reliable supply of these critical minerals you can’t build other industries that are depending on them and you become absolutely reliant on these trade partners who may not be your friends anymore,” Barron said.
There is no “alternative use” for the abyssal plain where the nodules reside “like golf balls on a driving range,” Barron said. “You can’t grow plants on it. People can’t live there. You couldn’t dream up a better place to have a very large abundant resource.”