There are fields of black boulders about the size of potatoes in the abyssal plain between Hawaii and Mexico, four kilometers below the Pacific Ocean’s surface, in almost complete darkness. They have been accumulating manganese, cobalt, nickel, and copper from the sluggish chemistry of the deep water for millions of years. They have never been mined for profit. The regulatory authorities tasked with overseeing that process are currently finding it difficult to keep up with the increasing number of businesses and governments attempting to modify that as soon as feasible.
Land is where the urgency originates. About 70% of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which serves as the hub of a supply chain that extends from artisanal mining in Katanga Province to battery manufacturers in China and, ultimately, to electric cars marketed in North America and Europe. Economically, ethically, and geopolitically, this concentration has always been unsettling.
Children have long been known to perform hazardous informal labor in the DRC’s cobalt mining industry, including manual labor on extraction sites. Before investor scrutiny and public pressure brought the topic into earnings calls, major automakers had been quietly acknowledging this type of supply chain for years.
Long before battery demand made the Clarion-Clipperton Zone a commercial opportunity, marine geologists were well familiar with its amount. The zone’s nodule resource was estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey to be over 21 billion metric tons, which, according to most estimates, includes more cobalt and manganese than all of the planet’s terrestrial deposits put together. The most aggressive in its pursuit of commercial extraction has been the metals company TMC, which has exploration contracts in the zone through several subsidiaries. In 2025, TMC applied directly to the U.S. government for a commercial recovery permit, completely eschewing the International Seabed Authority. Surprisingly, Lockheed Martin has had U.S. exploration permits in the same area since 1984, but it hasn’t done much with them in public.
The issue is that the regulations pertaining to all of this are still essentially incomplete. As of its July 2026 session in Kingston, the ISA has been negotiating a mining code for the international seabed for more than ten years, but important issues including environmental standards, liability frameworks, and criteria for stopping operations remain unsolved. Until the research catches up with the business pressure, at least 32 nations have demanded a moratorium or precautionary delay on commercial extraction. In contrast to the U.S. government’s determination to give licenses through its own 1980 legislation, independent of what the UN body decides, the ISA itself has stated that completion of the mining code is a prerequisite for any licensed economic operation in international waters.
The issue of the environment is real. One of the world’s least researched ecosystems is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. A dredge plume, which is a cloud of sediment created by harvesting machinery, can travel hundreds of kilometers and settle on habitat that took millennia to establish. This is why researchers are constantly discovering species there that they have never seen before. In the few studies that are available, recovery times for disrupted abyssal populations can take decades. Since commercial scale hasn’t yet occurred, no one has thoroughly calculated if that damage is worth the mineral yield.
