Days After Trump Commits to Seabed Mining, Two Sides Face Off
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At a congressional hearing, one executive welcomed President Trump’s “starting gun” to begin mining. Democrats and Republicans clashed over environmental and business concerns.
Less than a week after President Trump signed an executive order to accelerate seabed mining, the U.S. government received its first permit application from the Metals Company, one of the most ardent proponents of the as yet unproven practice.
On Tuesday, the company’s chief executive, Gerard Barron, was also on hand in Washington for a contentious hearing in front of the House Natural Resources Committee. He likened Mr. Trump’s move to a “starting gun” in the race to extract minerals like cobalt and nickel from potato-size nodules lying in the frigid, pitch-black, two-and-a-half-mile-deep sands of the Pacific Ocean floor.
Republican and Democratic committee members clashed over how much weight should be given to environmental concerns about the practice. The Trump administration has said it will consider issuing permits for mining in territorial U.S. waters and also in international waters.
Other countries have condemned the United States for essentially circumventing international law by saying it would permit seabed mining in waters that nearly every other country considers to be governed by the International Seabed Authority, an independent organization.
No commercial-scale seabed mining has ever taken place.
Representative Jared Huffman of California, who is also the committee’s ranking Democrat, said the Metals Company and Mr. Trump were moving seabed mining forward in a “reckless cowboy manner.” He and other Democrats questioned the business case for mining cobalt and nickel given that electric-vehicle manufacturers, once major buyers of the metals, were moving toward batteries that didn’t use them.