The possibility of harvesting the seabed is growing in popularity among lawmakers amid a push to extract rare minerals for defense applications
Mining the ocean floor for minerals often seemed like a fantasy, but U.S. national security concerns could be bringing it closer to reality.
Thousands of feet down at the bottom of the ocean, small rocks holding vast quantities of nickel, manganese and cobalt—the perfect combination of minerals to make an electric-vehicle battery—sit untouched, as high costs to reach them, a lack of research and public opposition have kept deep-sea mining a pipe dream.
Lobbying efforts seeking governmental approval to mine the seabed for EV battery metals often fell on deaf ears, but backers have found a way to appeal to lawmakers—as a source of cobalt for U.S. weapons makers that avoids Chinese suppliers, building on efforts to decouple from the Asian superpower.
“Without question the narrative around deep-sea mining has gone through an inflection point in that it has clearly found a home in the context of national security,” said Samir Kapadia, a Vogel Group lobbyist backed by The Metals Company, one of the few companies working in the field. Kapadia said that lawmakers in past years saw deep-sea mining as a “pie in the sky” idea, unlikely to come to fruition and even laughed at in some quarters.
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