Sometime in early 2026, the mechanics of US regulatory law subtly clashed with a much bigger issue: the ownership of the ocean floor. Most people didn’t see it. Nestled within a procedural revision released by NOAA in January, it took place in the language of a federal rulemaking document. However, Perkins Coie’s legal analysis caught what the headlines missed, and once you grasp the implications, they are more difficult to ignore.
The Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act of 1980, a law that has largely lain dormant for decades, was updated by NOAA’s final rule, which was released on January 21. The main change seems unremarkable: instead of going through two distinct, sequential reviews, applicants can now submit a single, combined application that covers both exploration and commercial recovery. Basically, faster paperwork. However, that isn’t exactly the case.
Procedural acceleration at this scale is never merely procedural, according to Perkins Coie’s analysis. The friction between an industry proposal and a federal permit is practically cut in half when two separate regulatory stages—each with environmental review requirements, public comment periods, and scientific assessment obligations—are combined into one. It seems that The Metals Company, a Vancouver-based company that operates through its U.S. subsidiary TMC USA, recognized this right away.
Nearly immediately after the rule was implemented, the company applied for a permit to mine 65,000 square kilometers of Pacific seabed. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone is a stretch of ocean that is more than twice the size of Vancouver Island. According to scientists, it is one of the planet’s most biologically rich and poorly understood environments.
The confidence in that filing is difficult to ignore. It seems as though the business had been anticipating both the rule and the signal it conveyed. Final approval is not granted by NOAA’s conclusion that TMC USA’s application satisfies regulatory requirements. However, it transforms deep-sea mining from a theoretical endeavor into a well-defined, progressive procedure. Before a permit decision is made sometime in early 2027, a draft environmental impact statement is anticipated to be made available for public comment.
The real complexity arises in the international dimension. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which defines the deep seabed as humanity’s shared heritage, has been ratified by about 90% of UN members. It was never ratified by the US. Although that asymmetry has always existed in theory, it is now materializing in a manner never seen before. No state has the right to unilaterally exploit deep-sea resources outside of UNCLOS, according to the ISA Secretary-General. A recent legal analysis even suggested that if TMC uses only U.S. permits, Canada, the company’s home country, might be in violation of international law.
Beneath all of this, there’s real scientific unease that doesn’t feel theatrical. Eighty percent of the seabed is still unmapped, recovery from mining disturbance may take decades or longer, and the sediment plumes produced by extraction equipment would impact much more than the immediate mining zone, according to researchers who have been making these claims for years. Substrate that took millions of years to form would be destroyed by the suggested method, which is essentially vacuuming the top few inches of the ocean floor. There would be nowhere for the mostly undocumented residents to go.
The claim that deep-sea nickel and cobalt are desperately needed for EV batteries has been waning for a while. A significant portion of the world’s production already comes from LFP battery chemistry, which completely ignores both minerals. The switch was mostly made by Chinese manufacturers. In a subtle way, the market might already be overcoming the rationale behind opening the ocean floor.
Perkins Coie’s work demonstrated that this rule is important because of what it normalizes rather than what it allows today. The framework is currently operational. The applications are genuine. Furthermore, the international governance framework that was meant to oversee this has not yet completed drafting its own regulations. The next few years will be determined by that difference between what the world has agreed upon and what U.S. law currently permits.
