President Trump has ordered the US government to make a major step towards exploitation of large ocean expanses, a decision that almost all other countries in the world consider the limits to this type of industrial activity.
The decree, signed Thursday, would bypass an international treaty old decades that each large coastal nation, with the exception of the United States, has ratified. This is the latest example of the Trump administration’s desire to ignore international institutions and is likely to cause an uproar of the country’s rivals and allies.
The order “establishes the United States as a world leader in mineral exploration and development of the seabed both within and beyond the national jurisdiction”, according to a Text published by the White House.
Trump’s ordinance asks the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to accelerate permits to exploit companies in international and American territorial waters.
Parts of the bottom of the ocean are covered with nodules the size of the potato containing precious minerals such as nickel, cobalt and manganese which are essential to advanced technologies that the United States considers essential to its economic and military security, but whose supply chains are increasingly controlled by China.
No operation of maritime funds on a commercial scale has never taken place. Technological obstacles are high and there have been serious concerns about environmental consequences.
Consequently, in the 1990s, most nations agreed to join an independent international authority that would go on the exploitation of the ocean in international waters. Because the United States is not signatories, the Trump administration is based on A dark law of 1980 which allows the federal government to issue permits for the extraction of seabed in international waters.
Many nations are impatient to see the exploitation of seabed becoming a reality. But so far, the dominant consensus has been that economic imperatives should not pray on the risk that mining can damage the fishing industry and oceanic food chains or could affect the essential role of the ocean in the absorption of carbon dioxide rechuing the planet of the atmosphere.
Mr. Trump’s order comes after years of delays in ISA in the establishment of a regulatory framework for the exploitation of seabed. Authority has still not accepted a set of rules.
The decree could open the way to Metals, a leading seabed company, to receive an accelerated NOAA permit to actively exploit for the first time. The listed company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, disclosed in March That he would ask the Trump administration through an American subsidiary for approval to exploit in international waters. The company has already spent more than $ 500 million to do exploratory work.
“We have a boat ready for production,” said Gerard Barron, managing director of the company on Thursday, in an interview. “We have a way to treat materials in a friendly partner nation. We simply miss the permit to allow ourselves to start. ”
By providing that the mining would ultimately be authorized, companies like his have invested massively in the development of technologies to exploit the ocean floors. They include ships with huge claws that would extend to foundations, as well as autonomous vehicles attached to gargantuan vacuum cleaners that would roam the bottom of the ocean.
Some analysts have questioned the need to rush to the mining of the seabed, since there is currently a nickel and cobalt overabundance of traditional mining. In addition, manufacturers of electric-developer batteries, one of the main metal markets, move to battery conceptions that are based on other elements.
However, projections of future demand for metals are generally high. And Mr. Trump’s growing trade war with China threatens to limit American access to some of these critical minerals, which include elements of the rare land which are also found in traces in the nodules of the seabed.
The American geological survey estimated That the nodules in a single gang of the eastern Pacific, known as the Clarion-Clipperton zone, contain more nickel, cobalt and manganese than all the combined land reserves. This area, in the open ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, is about half the size of the continental United States.
The contractual sites of the Metal Society are in the Clarion-Clipperton area, where the ocean has an average of around 2.5 miles deep. The company would be the first to request an operating license under the 1980 law.
Barron blamed a “takeover of the environmental activists” of the ISA for his delays in establishing a rules book that his business could have played, which led him to apply directly to the United States government in place.
In a statement provided to the New York Times last month, a spokesperson for the Noaa, Maureen O’Leary, said that the existing process under American law provided for “an in-depth review of environmental impact, interthering consultations and public comments opportunities”.
Under the 1994 United Nations Convention on the United Nations, nations have exclusive economic rights over the waters at 200 naval miles from their coasts, but international waters are under the jurisdiction of the ISA. Since the Law of the Sea entered into force, the State Department sent representatives to meetings at the headquarters of the Marine Funds authority in Kingston, Jamaica, creating the impression that the United States intended to honor the terms of the treaty, even if the Senate has never officially ratified it.
More than 30 countries have called for a Delay or moratorium At the start of the operation of seabed. A range of car manufacturers and technologies, including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Apple, Google and Samsung promised not to use minerals of the seabed. The representative case of the ED of Hawaii in January presented the US protection law of seabedThis would prohibit the NOAA from issuing licenses or permits for mining activities of the seabed.
ISA negotiators have spent more than a decade drafting The book of mining rules, which would cover everything, from environmental rules to fees of fees. Despite a commitment to finalize it this year, the negotiators seemed unlikely to respect this deadline.
Nevertheless, other major world powers such as China, Russia, India and several European countries – which have generally supported the rapid improvement of mines in international waters – have opposed the metal society to obtain a permit from the US government.
A large part of the hesitation to exploit the maritime foundations comes from the little that it was studied by scientists. Polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton area, for example, are in a cold world, always black inhabited by organizations that marine biologists have encountered only on uncommon missions.
“We believe that around half of the species that live in this area depend on the nodules during part of their development,” said Matthew Gianni, co-sea conservation coalition.
The ways that companies offer to operate essentially these ecosystems, said Mr. Gianni, and the plumes of sediment caused by mining could spread to wider areas, stifling others.
Metals, which has carried out its own environmental research for a decade, said that these concerns were exaggerated. “We believe that we have enough knowledge to start and prove that we can manage environmental risks,” Barron said in the press release last month.
Reaching the deep ocean is expensive and technologically complex, not quite different from traveling in another planet. “Humanity has only scratched the surface,” said Beth Orcutt, microbiologist at the Bigelow for Ocean Sciences laboratory. The deep sea covers around 70% of the earth.
The disturbance of ecosystems on the high seas, far away as they may seem, could have training effects from afar.
“The ecosystems themselves are really important in the main global cycles that allow the ocean to be productive and create fish and shells and feed people,” said Lisa Levin, an oceanographer with Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “And all these ecosystems are interconnected, so if you destroy one, we probably don’t even understand what happens to others in several ways.”
The greatest consequence could be to lose whole ecosystems before scientists have a chance to understand them. It would be a loss of the type of science that can fuel unexpected discoveries, such as new drugs or new perspectives on how life has been formed on earth or could form on other planets.
“If we want to exploit the deep sea, we must be willing to abandon these ecosystems,” said Dr. Levin.
Eric Lipton Contributed reports.
