The Metals Company on Thursday became the first deep-sea miner to seek Washington's approval to mine the international seabed under a streamlined permitting process introduced earlier this week.
Deep-sea mining has the potential to provide large amounts of the minerals needed for electric vehicles and the energy transition, but debate over the environmental damage it may cause has dragged on for decades and prevented licences being issued.
The US Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday said it would consolidate the licensing and permitting process into a single and ostensibly shorter review.
"Those amended regulations pave a pathway for faster permitting and us moving into commercial production sooner rather than later," Gerard Barron, TMC's CEO, told Reuters.
The Vancouver-based company hopes to obtain its permit by the end of the year, Barron said. London-listed miner and commodity trader Glencore has agreed to buy metals TMC extracts from the seabed. Under the new guidelines, The Metals Company resubmitted an application it had filed last April to operate in part of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.
The company said two zones that The Metals Company has applied to operate in contain an estimated 800 million tonnes of rocks known as polymetallic nodules filled with critical minerals including nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese.
The Metals Company and other supporters of deep-sea mining say it would lessen the need for large mining operations on land, which are often unpopular with host communities.
Environmental activists have called for the activity to be banned, alleging that industrial operations on the ocean floor could cause irreversible biodiversity loss.
The United Nations-backed International Seabed Authority has been engaged in a protracted quest for international mining standards. Any country can allow deep-sea mining in its own territorial waters, roughly up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) from shore.
(Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; editing by Barbara Lewis)
