The Great Race to the Bottom | Nauru, the world’s least populated country, may soon become the gateway to the biggest global rush for natural resources since the oil rush: the era of deep-sea mining. El Confidencial spoke to HCSS strategic advisor Jeff Amrish Ritoe.
The commercial mining of the ocean depths is prohibited in international waters, outside the jurisdiction of any State and where practically all submarine mineral resources are found. The entity that has exclusive competence to grant these permits is the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body of 167 Member States, together with the European Union, established by virtue of the Convention on Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to protect the seabed.
What the ISA has been allowing for years are exploration rights to investigate specific areas of the seabed and reserve them for potential commercial exploitation projects. These agreements require interested companies to partner with one of the Member States. To date, the organization has given 22 companies and governments permission to survey thousands of square kilometres of territory.
And while these missions have been conducted at multiple points in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, the vast majority have been concentrated in territory west of Central America and east of Hawaii known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ ). Home to nearly 60 exploration blocks, this area is especially popular with mining companies for its richness in polymetallic nodules, one of the top three sources of undersea mineral resources.
The Metals Company (TMC) , a Canada-based startup founded in 2011, seeks to be the first company in history to conduct commercial deep-sea mining. With the backing of multiple million-dollar investments and after having carried out successful tests at the end of last year with a harvesting robot, its CEO, Gerard Barron, says he is eager to get started. ” But how does Barron plan to start mining the seabed in international waters if it continues to be prohibited?
The answer lies in what is known as paragraph 15 , a small clause located in the annex to the 1994 Implementation Agreement, which modified UNCLOS. This paragraph stipulates that, if a country formally raises its desire to sponsor a company that mines in deep waters, the ISA has two years to develop the rules, regulations and procedures necessary to respond to this government. Once the deadline has passed, the agency “must provisionally consider and approve said exploitation plan”, regardless of whether it has approved a regulatory framework on time or not. As long as it is one of the 167 member states of the ISA, any country can trigger this clause. Even if it is the least populated island in the world.
In June 2021, Nauru formally submitted to the ISA its “intent to seek approval of a plan of work” for deep-sea mining, invoking, for the first time in the agency’s history, the two-year countdown. The company sponsored by the island is Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI), a wholly owned subsidiary of TMC. ISA’s term to complete the development of the operating regulations expired on July 9 without the organization having managed to approve any type of regulation in this regard.
Despite having exceeded the deadline, the process has been extended until this Friday, July 21 , when three frantic weeks of negotiations in Kingston will conclude in which it is expected to reach some kind of conclusion to deal with the Nauru request. What will that conclusion be? In an interview with El Confidencial, Jeff Amrish Ritoe, strategic advisor on energy and raw materials for the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) and manager in the mining industry, explains the three possible scenarios.
“First, there could be a general ban on exploitation in international waters, which is highly unlikely. Second, they could pass a mining code that is acceptable to everyone involved,” Ritoe says. “However, it must be taken into account that it is an organization that makes decisions by consensus. Therefore, a simple majority does not serve to approve such a regulation. For this reason, I do not believe that by July 21, after two years without obtaining results, an agreement of this type will be reached ”, he adds.
There is, however, a third option that has gained considerable momentum in recent weeks: the so-called moratorium . More than a dozen countries, including Spain, France, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Ireland, Chile, New Zealand, and multiple Pacific island nations—plus most of the international scientific community and a wide range of international organizations – have requested that a temporary pause be decreed to be able to examine the real impact of deep-sea mining in international waters . If this pause is agreed, The Metals Company’s manoeuvre could have had an effect contrary to what was desired.
Industry voices have downplayed the biodiversity impact of deep-sea mining—most of the species that would be affected are microscopic—and have argued that this environmental damage, as well as the amount of carbon stored in the CCZ that would be released to the surface, must be compared to that used for mining above ground . “It’s important to ask the question: ‘Does it make sense to collect mineral-filled stones from the seabed instead of destroying Indonesian rainforests, killing orangutans and moving entire villages just to get nickel?’ Ritoe says.
Read the full article by Lucas Proto in El Confidencial (in Spanish).
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