The ocean floor on Minamitorishima Island, a small Japanese coral atoll located in the western Pacific around 2,000 kilometers southeast of Tokyo, contains something that businesses and governments have been calculating for years. Concentrations of heavy rare earth elements, especially yttrium and several dysprosium-rich compounds, are significantly higher in deep-sea mud at several thousand meters than in the majority of known terrestrial deposits. This zone has been thoroughly surveyed by Japan’s marine science agency, which has ran sample cores and created models of what might actually be extracted. The existence of the resource is not the question. The question is if anyone can find out how to get it out in a cost-effective, legal, and non-regulatory manner without the project being derailed before it ever gets underway.
Rare earth elements are one of those subjects that, until someone draws attention to them, operate almost exclusively in the background of contemporary technology. Neodymium and dysprosium are needed for the magnets in electric car motors. Terbium and europium are found in the phosphors used in LED lighting. Several rare earths are used in the guiding components of precision-guided weapons systems. Neodymium-iron-boron magnets, which can weigh hundreds of pounds each, are used in wind turbine turbines. For many of their current uses, these 17 elements have no near-term alternatives and are not interchangeable with one another. Even if there was complete political will, it would take decades to rebuild the supply chain for all of them through China.
Ore reserves are not the main factor in China’s dominance in rare earth processing; rather, it is the infrastructure for refining that transforms ore into pure metals and oxides. The geology of other nations contains rare earth minerals, some of which are being mined. One of the only businesses with a sizable rare earth processing facility outside of China is Lynas Corporation of Australia. However, China has a disproportionate amount of the world’s processing capability for converting rare earth ore into materials suitable for batteries or magnets, making the supply chain vulnerable. Following a maritime dispute in 2010, Beijing imposed restrictions on rare earth exports to Japan, which had an immediate and noticeable impact. Japan diversified its sources over the course of the following ten years. The issue hasn’t been entirely resolved.
On paper, at least, the seabed presents a different geography. Polymetallic nodule fields have been mapped for decades in the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone. In addition to the cobalt and nickel that receive more economic interest, seamounts in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are covered in ferromanganese deposits that are rich in cobalt and have high concentrations of rare earth elements. A distinct kind of resource is found in deep-sea mud deposits, such as those found close to Minamitorishima. These deposits contain fine-grained sediment that has accumulated rare earth elements over millions of years due to geological processes. According to surveys conducted in Japan, these muds may contain resource levels that, if commercially mined, would be significant at the national supply chain scale.
In parallel, the United States has been making progress. Despite having different policies on the majority of issues, both the Biden and Trump administrations expressed interest in increasing U.S. access to seabed minerals. Instead of negotiating the disputed governance of international waters, proposals to offer leases for exploration around U.S. territories in the Pacific, particularly the Northern Mariana Islands, reflect an attempt to secure access to resources inside U.S. control. The distinction is important since doing business inside a U.S. exclusive economic zone completely avoids the International Seabed Authority and gives the US the authority to establish its own conditions for environmental standards, permits, and extraction.
Everyone interested in seabed minerals talks is concurrently interacting with and working around the ISA. The ISA, which was established by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to regulate the global seabed as a shared human legacy, has awarded over thirty exploration contracts to corporate and state-backed organizations in three ocean basins. For years, it has been working to complete a commercial mining code. The code is not yet complete. A moratorium on commercial extraction has been demanded by France and a group of Pacific island governments until sufficient environmental regulations and enforcement systems are established. While the governance argument rages on, China, which participates heavily in ISA proceedings, has been methodically charting underwater areas.
Deep-sea mining poses environmental dangers that are too significant to be dismissed as procedural obstacles. Toxic metals are transported into ecosystems with virtually no recovery mechanism on human timescales via sediment plumes from extraction vehicles that travel through the water column. Commercial operations have the potential to permanently damage the biodiversity of deep-sea nodule fields, which are yet mostly unmapped. The scientific community has consistently stated that commercial pressure is outpacing the rate of regulatory development. The question of whether that regulatory gap is a structural aspect of a governance system in which the nations that stand to earn the most from quick extraction also have the greatest influence over the rate at which standards are produced is less clear.
