Today’s newsletter looks at the contentious politics of deep-sea mining as the International Seabed Authority, a global regulatory body, holds its annual meeting in Jamaica. You can read and share the full story on Bloomberg.com. For unlimited access to climate and energy news, please subscribe. 

Refereeing the race to mine the sea floor

By Todd Woody

In April, President Donald Trump had issued an executive order expediting US licensing of deep-sea mining in international waters, departing from international law to unleash what the administration called a “gold rush” to “counter China’s growing influence.” On Monday, China and other nations condemned the move at a meeting of the International Seabed Authority, the United Nations-affiliated organization drafting regulations to govern mining in the global seabed. 

“It is outrageous that the US side is ignoring the strong opposition of the international community and pushing forward unilateralist hegemonic acts,” said China representative Wenting Zhao at a meeting of the 169-nation International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica. 

China, which is set to conduct ISA-sanctioned tests of two seabed mining machines in the Pacific over the next year, already dominates the critical minerals supply chain on land.

A Canadian-registered seabed miner, The Metals Company, had successfully lobbied the US president, tapping into his pursuit of China-free metals. The global seabed, TMC repeatedly emphasized as it lobbied politicians and the White House, holds the planet’s largest estimated reserves of minerals like cobalt and nickel in the form of black rocks called polymetallic nodules. These cover the Pacific Ocean floor by the billions.

Samples of polymetallic nodules at the Viridian Biometals lab in Pasadena, California.  Photographer: Alex Welsh/Bloomberg

In an instant, Trump cleared the way for a race to the abyss to extract nodules, even though seabed mining technology remains under development and commercially unproven. Within days of Trump's order, TMC’s US subsidiary filed the world’s first application to mine the seabed in international waters, including an area the company licenses from the ISA. Delegates in Kingston on Monday also ordered a report on ISA-licensed seabed miners at risk of violating their contracts with the body, a thinly veiled reference to TMC and other companies that might also seek to apply for US licenses to mine in international waters.

A Silicon Valley startup called Impossible Metals, meanwhile, has applied for a license to explore and possibly mine nodules in US waters off American Samoa, with an aim to raise $1 billion. Then on July 14, a top executive at US defense giant Lockheed Martin told the Financial Times the company is in talks to give seabed miners access to international areas of the Pacific it licenses from the US.

The Trump-triggered seabed mining boom faces significant hurdles, though. While TMC has told investors it expects to begin mining within a year of receiving a license, the technology to extract minerals from the seabed at depths of four kilometers (2.5 miles) could be years away from being deployed at scale. Its competitiveness with terrestrial mining is unknown, as is the economic viability of processing and refining seabed minerals amid seesawing metal prices and the growing market share of battery technologies not reliant on nodule metals. The US lacks such metallurgical capacity, and it could take years to bring online in the few countries outside of China with the potential to refine nodule minerals.

The countries that TMC relies on for seabed mining and processing technology are among the ISA’s member nations (plus the European Union) that oppose unilateral mining in international waters. Amid such backlash, a Japanese corporation, Pacific Metals Company, that planned to process TMC’s nodules has now told investors that it would only “launch operations once the international rules are finalized.”

Read the whole story on Bloomberg.com.

Not just rocks

Plunging ahead

More from Green

Major tech firms should commit to fully powering data centers with renewable energy by 2030, said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

Big tech also must be responsible in its use of water for cooling, Guterres said Tuesday in New York City as he presented the UN’s new report on the energy transition, Seizing the Moment of Opportunity, together with the International Renewable Energy Agency. 

“AI can boost efficiency, innovation and resilience in energy systems, but it is also energy hungry,” Guterres said. “This is not sustainable — unless we make it so.” 

A typical AI data center consumes as much power as 100,000 homes, according to the UN, and the largest centers now being built will use 20 times that. By 2030, data centers could consume as much electricity as all of Japan today, the report finds.

António Guterres at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, 2025.  Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg

US EV sales have softened — but not for all brands. Americans bought 310,800 electric vehicles in the second quarter of the year, a 6.3% drop from the year-earlier period, according to Cox Automotive Inc. However, the dip was nearly equal to the slump in transactions for Tesla Inc. General Motors Co. is now selling 12 fully electric vehicles in the US and saw sales surge. 

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. has helped structure a first-of-its-kind lending facility for a developer of carbon credits. The US bank, together with a syndicate of smaller lenders, closed a $210 million loan deal that will enable carbon developer Chestnut Carbon to meet its obligations under a 25-year agreement to generate credits from forestry projects in Arkansas and Texas, and deliver them to Microsoft Corp. 

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cuts almost $500 billion in US clean-energy spending, just as the country was starting to get serious about its climate goals. Some say the country is acting like a petrostate, waging war against clean energy. Others are more sanguine and believe that the US will stay the course in the long term. 

This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi is joined by Jigar Shah, a clean energy expert and former head of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, to make sense of the bill’s impacts, and whether it’s as bad for climate as it seems. Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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