From CFACT
By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.
Vowing to “counter China’s growing influence over seabed mineral resources,” the Trump administration is opening a new front against America’s chief geopolitical rival.
“Vast offshore seabed areas hold critical minerals and energy resources,” an April 24 presidential executive order states. “These resources are key to strengthening our economy, securing our energy future, and reducing dependence on foreign suppliers for critical minerals.”
The timing of the executive order is no coincidence. Though President Trump and his advisers recognized the strategic importance of rare earths and other critical minerals as early as his first term, the matter has become even more urgent. In retaliation for U.S. tariffs, China recently restricted the export of rare earths to the United States. And Beijing has leverage.
China is the source of 90 percent of the world’s rare-earth minerals. It extracts them at sites around the world and refines them at facilities in China. This vertical control of the global rare-earth supply chain gives Beijing a near monopoly over minerals that go into “everything from satellites and jet fighters to CT scanners and iPhones,” The Wall Street Journal notes.
When rare earths are combined with Beijing’s formidable position in the mining and processing of other critical minerals — such as nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese — China enjoys a wide lead that will not be easy to narrow.
How will the Trump executive order on seabed mining address this? The strategy has six components:
—Develop domestic capabilities for exploration, characterization, collection, and processing of seabed mineral resources.
—Support development of deep-sea science, mapping, and technology.
—Enhance coordination among federal agencies with respect to seabed mineral development.
—Establish the U.S. as a global leader in responsible mineral seabed exploration, development technologies and practices, and as a partner for countries developing seabed mineral resources within their national jurisdictions, including their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ).
—Create a robust domestic supply chain for critical minerals derived from deep-sea resources to support economic growth, reindustrialization, and military preparedness, including through new processing capabilities.
—Strengthen partnerships with allies and industry to counter China’s growing influence over seabed mineral resources and ensure that U.S. companies are well-positioned to support allies and partners interested in developing deep-sea mineral resources within their national jurisdictions, including their EEZs.
While the resource potential of the seabed is significant, and the Trump plan is nothing if not ambitious, serious challenges remain. The executive order devotes much attention to polymetallic nodules, which exist throughout the ocean floor.
“To date, no country has extracted these resources at a commercial scale,” said Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz in an analysis for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The ocean region that has garnered the most attention is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a 1.7 million square-mile patch of ocean in international waters between Mexico and Hawaii. The zone contains the largest known nodule field on the globe, estimated at 21.1 billion tons.”
As an indication of the challenge facing the administration, Baskaran and Schwartz said that the United States “currently lacks the processing infrastructure needed to process polymetallic nodules at-scale.”
Another complication, one ripe with the potential for international conflict, arises from jurisdictional issues surrounding deep-sea mining. Extracting minerals from the ocean floor within the U.S. EEZ is one thing, but mining minerals in waters beyond American jurisdiction is quite another. The Senate, dating back to the Ronald Reagan era, has refused to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was adopted in 1982 and went into force in 1994.
The Law of the Sea Treaty, as it is commonly known, established the International Seabed Authority (IS A), the U.N. body that governs deep-sea resources, largely through licenses it issues to eligible countries (169) that have ratified the treaty.
Baskaran and Schwartz point out that the executive order “essentially bypasses the ISA to allow U.S. companies to gain access to resources in international waters without consultation or permission from the U.N. body.”
For the “America First” administration, bypassing a U.N. body is second nature, completely consistent with its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement or the World Health Organization. Qualified American companies eager to engage in deep-sea mining can count on having the Trump White House at their backs. They can also form partnerships with companies from allied countries that have ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty, even if that ruffles a few feathers at the United Nations.
Seabed mining is environmentally risky with the ever-present threat of a spill that can lead to significant liability. Further, creating domestic processing facilities will require an expedited permitting process and a labor force sufficiently trained to meet the task. The U.S. cannot afford to stand aside and leave the field to China.
The game is on.
This article originally appeared at DC Journal
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