PRC poised to mine deep seabed for coveted metals despite environmental concerns

FORUM Staff

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to extract deep-sea rocks containing highly desired metals — cobalt, lithium, graphite and other essential components of electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, solar panels and jet engines — despite widespread concerns that scooping up potato-sized polymetallic nodules and other valuable mineral deposits will damage ocean ecosystems.

Already the world’s top provider of many of the metals, partly through unscrupulous land-based mining methods, the PRC wants to dominate the supply chain by influencing international deep-sea mining regulations. Meanwhile, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the environmental effects of mining thousands of meters beneath the ocean surface. Little is known about how best to mitigate environmental hazards in the deep sea, such as the potential effects of stirring up large sediment clouds that could spread toxic heavy metals, or mining noise and light that could harm ocean floor habitats.

“Today, we are at a crossroads,” Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr. said at the International Seabed Authority (ISA) Assembly in Kingston, Jamaica, in July and August 2024. Established under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1994, the ISA is tasked with protecting deep-sea environments from harmful activities and producing a mining code that includes regulatory, environmental and financial provisions. “We have so much to learn about the deep seabed and the vital role it plays for our planet,” Whipps said.

Canada, France, Germany, Guatemala, Ireland, Honduras, Sweden, Tuvalu and the United Kingdom are among 30 nations that have called for a pause or ban on deep-sea mining, Dialogue Earth, a London-based environmental think tank, reported in August 2024. Other nations and companies, including the PRC and its state-controlled firms, are eager to explore the sea floor for valuable metals The United States adheres to UNCLOS provisions but has not ratified the treaty, and thus monitors ISA discussions as an observer.

The ISA has approved at least 30 licenses to explore about 1.4 million square kilometers of polymetallic nodule fields, seafloor massive sulfides (formations around hydrothermal vents) and cobalt-rich crusts on underwater mountains. Most of the licenses are for testing methods to gather nodules in a vast area of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, The Washington Post newspaper reported in October 2023. The zone is estimated to have up to six times more cobalt and three times more nickel than all land-based reserves.

The PRC has more deep-sea exploration licenses than any other country. Ocean floor mining could bolster its attempts to dominate emerging industries such as clean energy. The PRC accounts for 77% of the world’s refined cobalt, 65% of its chemical lithium and 91% of its battery-grade graphite, The Diplomat magazine reported in August 2024.

Environmentalists and human rights advocates, however, have criticized Beijing’s terrestrial mining practices. They worry the PRC’s low environmental standards and poor resource management practices will carry over into the deep sea.

Scientists and environmentalists fear heavy machinery would ravage the ocean floor, with currents dispersing the resulting mining waste products. Meanwhile, rocks pumped to the surface to be crushed for extraction would be dumped back into the ocean, creating destructive sediment plumes. Experts worry that undersea mining without proper regulations and an understanding of its environmental consequences would cause irreversible damage, according to Dialogue Earth.

“The deep sea is mostly unmapped and unexplored,” Lisa Levin, a founder of the Deep-Ocean Stewardship Initiative, a global network of deep-ocean management experts, told Foreign Policy magazine. “Most of the areas that people are targeting for mining have yet to have the ecosystems and species described in a way that would allow us to manage any kind of destructive activity like mining effectively.”