WASHINGTON

In the year since President Donald Trump signed an executive order promising to create a deep-sea mining industry from scratch, businesses have raised millions of dollars from investors, stock prices have soared and federal regulators have raced to fast-track a permitting process.

At least nine companies are in talks with the government for access to seabed minerals, according to an Associated Press review. Sections of the seafloor from American Samoa to Alaska could be auctioned for offshore mining this summer and through the fall.

All the action suggests the U.S. may soon give the green light for companies to commercially mine the seabed — something that’s never been done in international waters.

But a close look at some of the companies involved reveals uncertain track records and histories spattered with legal disputes, while major questions about how the minerals would be processed and refined remain unanswered. Watchers of the nascent industry are skeptical the promised riches will ever materialize.

“It just feels right to people thinking that there is a cornucopia of metals on the bottom of the seafloor that are just there to be plucked up like seashells on the seashore,” said Victor Vescovo, a private equity investor and deep-sea explorer who has chosen not to back any deep-sea mining companies.

“If there’s more scrutiny on their actual financial models,” he added, “you would go, ‘Wait a second, this is much more uncertain.’”

Trump’s executive order in April last year marked a sudden embrace of an industry long dormant in the U.S. The president hailed seafloor minerals as vital to America’s future prosperity and its trade independence from China. He directed U.S. agencies to expedite permitting.

The most widely prized ores are fist-shaped rocks known as polymetallic nodules, formed over millions of years from the remains of sunken shark teeth and shells. They contain high grades of manganese, copper, nickel and cobalt, and much smaller amounts of rare earth elements.

Other parts of the seafloor have drawn prospectors, too: the mineral-rich crusts atop volcanic seamounts, and the rocky mounds flecked with gold and silver near hydrothermal vents. Nearer to shore, companies have proposed dredging ocean sands for titanium, zirconium and phosphorites. But for many companies, seafloor nodules hold the most allure.

Trillions of nodules lie on the international seabed between Mexico and Hawaii, scientists say. For more than a decade, delegates from dozens of countries have convened at the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica with the difficult task of creating globally agreed upon mining rules for those areas, which belong to no single country.

The agency has so far granted exploration rights to nearly two dozen contractors, but has not allowed any to mine commercially. Under its mandate, the minerals are designated for the shared benefit of “all humankind.”

Trump’s order suggests the U.S. will decide for itself when to mine the global seabed, reversing the decision of previous administrations to honor the seabed authority’s rules.

In a statement, a White House spokesperson said “all presidential actions are legally sound.”

on Fast track

Geologists have known about polymetallic nodules for more than a century, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that companies started building technology to haul them to the surface.

At the time, the laws of the sea were still in the making, with ongoing talks at the United Nations over how countries would use and protect the oceans beyond their borders. When it came to seabed mining, the U.S. was at odds with much of the world over how the resources and technology should be shared.

In 1980, with global talks still in progress, Congress passed the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act and created a process for U.S. companies to mine the deep sea. The U.S. issued four exploration licenses in 1984.

Yet in the decades that followed, low metals prices and the brewing uncertainty around international rules pushed several of those companies to forfeit their licenses or dissolve. Today, more than 150 countries agree that deep-sea mining should be mutually governed by the seabed authority. Lockheed Martin holds the only two exploration licenses still active in the U.S.

Two U.S. agencies will enforce rules: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees minerals beyond U.S. borders, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a division of the Department of the Interior that regulates offshore oil, gas, wind and minerals in U.S. waters.

NOAA has never approved a commercial project for seabed mining; nor has BOEM, beyond a short-lived mining effort in California waters more than 60 years ago. But their leaders, appointed by Trump, are pushing for that to change.

In June, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced a mandate for BOEM to “speed up” the development of critical minerals offshore, and outlined steps to streamline the regulatory process. The agency soon announced it was evaluating seabed mining in the waters of Alaska, Virginia, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. It plans to hold the first lease sale as early as August, according to a budget proposal, and in the coming months will restructure under the new name of the Marine Minerals Administration.

NOAA, too, is working quickly to approve permits. Until this year, the agency required companies to have an exploration license before they could pursue commercial operations; in January, it said companies could apply for both activities at once. NOAA has requested funds to expand its permitting staff and set a target of processing 16 applications next fiscal year.

Treasure hunters

So far, the companies answering the call of Trump’s executive order include a firm that once made money hunting for sunken treasure, and a South Carolina-based startup that sprung from an effort to find Amelia Earhart’s lost plane.

And it includes The Metals Co., long seen as the front-runner in the industry. If the U.S. grants a permit, the firm says it is ready to commercially mine the seafloor before the end of next year. It is one of few companies to have tested equipment in deep-water conditions — hauling up 3,000 metric tons of nodules in a 2022 trial.

The company has close ties to the Trump administration. CEO Gerard Barron says he was in the White House on the day Trump signed the executive order, and since then, he’s been invited to speak at three congressional hearings on deep-sea mining. The Metals Co. has received financial advice from Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment group Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick led for decades until Trump appointed him to federal office. Lutnick is now in charge of NOAA and could be influential in the final decision on permits.

In a January congressional hearing, U.S. Rep. Ed Case, a Hawaii Democrat, accused The Metals Co. of being “in bed” with NOAA and having advance knowledge of the agency’s plans, citing the close timing of certain events. The Metals Co. submitted its seabed mining applications within a week of the executive order last year, and resubmitted them under the streamlined regulations one day after NOAA finalized the new rules.

At the hearing, Barron denied the accusation, saying it’s the company’s job to respond to and anticipate government action. “We had lobbied hard” against some of the regulatory inefficiencies, he added.

Since 2024, records show the company spent nearly $800,000 on lobbying for seabed mining issues, including permitting. Its stock price hit record highs across the last year.

Tampa, Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration has also signaled interest in offshore mining. Odyssey formed in the 1990s with a mission to discover sunken treasure and sell the artifacts for profit. The company claims to have found more shipwrecks than any other organization in the world.

But Odyssey ran into trouble in 2007, when it discovered an underwater shipwreck littered with silver and gold coins that Odyssey brought to the U.S. Later, the government of Spain said the wreck matched descriptions of a Spanish naval ship sunk by the British in 1804. Warships are immune to the claims of salvagers. Odyssey argued the remains couldn’t reliably be identified, but after years of bitter court battles, relinquished the treasure.

Amid the legal fight, the company pivoted to pursuing seafloor minerals.

There, too, Odyssey ran into controversy. The company’s subsidiary was awarded mining permits in Mexico’s Gulf of Ulloa for a project that would have dredged 7 million tons of mineral sands per year, operating 24 hours per day, according to Odyssey’s proposal, with a goal of extracting phosphate for fertilizer.

But the Mexican government withdrew its support during its environmental review out of concern the mining would disturb marine habitats and threaten loggerhead turtles. Officials later argued Odyssey didn’t have enough mining experience.

The company sued the government of Mexico for damages, winning $37 million in 2024, more than 10 years after it received the first mining permit.

In December, BOEM announced that Odyssey had requested the agency begin the regulatory process to consider mining off the coast of Virginia. As in Mexico, the company is hoping to dredge coastal sands.

In a statement, an Odyssey spokesperson said the company carefully selected the area to avoid sensitive marine habitats and shipping traffic, and that dredging is an established tool for construction projects and can be done safely.

This spring, the company said it will merge with and adopt the name of American Ocean Minerals Corp. which incorporated last year and has applied for NOAA’s permission to explore for seafloor nodules.

Multiple Fears

Out in the U.S. territories of the Pacific Ocean, another fight is brewing over potential mining. The startup Impossible Metals has set its sights on seafloor nodules in U.S. waters near American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, despite growing outcry from local residents and leaders.

American Samoa has banned deep-sea mining in local waters, while a similar push is underway in the Northern Marianas. Nearby Guam has banned deep-sea mining, too. Republican House representatives from all three territories worry their constituents will bear the environmental and economic harms. But the final decision is in the hands of the federal government, which controls U.S. waters beyond 3 miles from shore.

Impossible Metals boasts of being the most environmentally friendly deep-sea mining company. Most mining machines are built to drive along the seafloor, endangering the sea sponges, nematodes and brittle stars that live among nodules. Impossible Metals is building a fleet of robots that it says will float above the seabed and collect only rocks that don’t contain marine life. The company has offered island territories 1% of future profits.

Critics question whether the technology will work, and if there will in fact be any profits to share.

Still other companies are lining up for U.S. permission. American Metal Resources and SeaX, both formed last year, applied for exploration licenses that are under NOAA review.

No profit guarantee

Deep-sea ecologists and ocean advocates have fought against seabed mining for years on the grounds that the deep ocean remains vastly under-studied, and that mining could extinguish its fragile life.

But a number of analysts and investors also question its economic merit.

Of the four metals contained in polymetallic nodules, copper is the surest bet to see sustained demand given the booming need for electrical wiring.

But mineral forecasts, said mining consultant Lyle Trytten, “often get a lot of attention when they’re very high, and then things change.”

Five years ago, The Metals Co. built its marketing on the surging demand for metals to build electric vehicle batteries. Forecasters projected global shortages and prices soared.

In the years since, battery design has evolved and no longer depends as much on cobalt and nickel, leaving seabed mining companies with a more subdued outlook on profits. Even highly- sought copper is already being replaced in some industry sectors with aluminum.

Ian Lange, a professor of mineral economics at the Colorado School of Mines, said deep-sea mining advocates seem to overlook the more affordable and widely available sources of minerals on land. He questioned whether demand is strong enough: Copper mines in Michigan and Wyoming are fully permitted but inactive; a cobalt mine is idled in Idaho.

“I personally am skeptical that what’s holding people back (from deep-sea mining) is nonmarket things like permitting,” he said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission requires publicly listed mining companies to assess the economic viability of their projects in a document known as a pre-feasibility study.

The Metals Co. did so last year, and forecast that it would break even in its eighth year of commercial seabed mining — the same year that it forecast the mineral reserves to be “all mined.”

Unless the project expands, said Simon Jowitt, Nevada’s state geologist and director of the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, “there’s not going to be any profit in the project.”

The Metals Co. said it had completed mining plans and seafloor surveys for the first eight years of the project, and that the costs of surveying, sampling and analyzing additional seafloor minerals were best incurred once the project was underway. The company is confident those resources will be minable.

It would take at least three land-based mines to produce the four minerals that exist in seafloor nodules, the company said, and this variety makes the project resilient to economic headwinds or changing demand for metals.

Deep-sea mining companies will also face challenges around where to process the nodules. Despite Trump’s focus on trade independence, the U.S. currently has no major processing facilities for nickel, manganese or cobalt.

Building these facilities on U.S. soil will take time and money — a lot of it. “That is going to take some engineering and some capital,” said James Deckelman, head of Deep Sea Minerals Corp. “But there’s just so much support from the U.S. government right now, so much momentum.”