Deep-sea mining is moving closer to reality, even as the international rules that would govern the industry remain unfinished.

For more than a decade, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) has been working towards a Mining Code that would govern commercial mining in international waters. Part 1 of the 31st Session of the ISA negotiations concluded in Kingston, Jamaica, on March 19 without a final agreement.

Despite the lack of a completed regulatory framework, interest in deep-sea mining continues to grow.

Mining companies are developing technologies to collect polymetallic nodules—potato-sized, mineral-rich rocks containing nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese—that lie unattached on abyssal plains 4,000 to 6,000 metres below the ocean surface in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and Peru Basin in the Pacific Ocean, as well as the Central Indian Ocean Basin.

Industry proponents argue that rising demand for critical minerals, driven by electrification, artificial intelligence infrastructure and geopolitical concerns over supply chains, is making these deep-sea resources increasingly attractive.

However, commercial mining in international waters has yet to begin. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the ISA, which was established in 1994, must first create the regulatory framework that will govern the exploitation of seabed minerals beyond national jurisdictions.

“The International Seabed Authority makes the rules,” explained Elizabeth Steyn, assistant professor of law at the University of Calgary, in an interview with CIM Magazine. “The ISA has extended certain exploration contracts, but it has not given any mining licences yet.”

 The negotiation of those rules has proven to be far more complicated than drafting a typical mining regulation.

The Mining Code must establish environmental rules, financial arrangements, management and monitoring mechanisms, and benefit-sharing provisions between nations governing deep-sea resources.

“Simply said, it’s really hard to get over 170 countries to agree on wording,” said Cara James, a PhD candidate in geophysics at the University of British Columbia whose research examines the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining. “When [UNCLOS] was set up, there was this agreement that the minerals from the seabed were the common heritage of humankind. There’s a lot of arguments now about legally, what that constitutes—should every penny of profit be shared by every human being?”

Alternative regulation pathway

As ISA negotiations continue—Part 2 of the 31st session took place from July 13 to 24—an alternative regulatory pathway is gaining momentum.

The United States intends to expedite applications for international seabed mining through its National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act (DSHMRA). This U.S. law was enacted in 1980, before the ISA existed, and is the basis of the country’s argument that it has the right not only to regulate deep-sea mining within its own territorial waters, but also in international waters.

For Steyn, this raises fundamental questions about international governance. Although most countries recognize UNCLOS as the legal framework governing international waters, the United States never ratified the convention.

 “We have these two conflicting views, and the international lawyers are saying [NOAA] is illegal because it is contrary to UNCLOS,” she said. “But here’s my question: who’s going to stop them? International law and the United Nations don’t have a police force.”

If countries begin authorizing commercial mining outside the ISA process, it could weaken the authority of the international regime before the Mining Code is complete and could potentially encourage other nations to establish competing regulatory systems, said Steyn.

James Deckelman, CEO of Deep Sea Minerals Corp., a Vancouver-based seabed mineral exploration and development company, acknowledged the possibility of regime conflict due to the existence of two operative regulatory regimes in waters beyond national jurisdiction. “Unfortunately, I don’t see industry moving towards an integrated framework any time soon,” he said.

Still, Deckelman believes different regulatory systems can ultimately coexist under common grounds.

“My hope is that both jurisdictions can harmonize on base principles—such as environmental protection—the standards, the processes and the safeguards that are to be adhered to in order to ensure responsible, sustainable development of seabed mineral resources,” he said.

Unanswered questions

Scientists agree that what we know about the deep-sea environment has progressed considerably in the last decade, but whether this understanding has kept pace with technological advancements and industry enthusiasm remains another matter.

“The key takeaway is there are still a lot of scientific uncertainties surrounding deep-sea mining,” said James.

She described assessing environmental impacts as a three-step process: researchers must first understand what the mining process would look like, then determine how it would alter the physical and chemical environment and finally understand how those changes would affect marine life.

The greatest uncertainty lies in that final step, she said.

Many organisms living on abyssal plains have never been studied, making it difficult to predict how mining could affect them, said James. The greater challenge is that, unlike shallow-water ecosystems, deep-sea species cannot easily be brought into laboratories to be studied because they exist under pressures hundreds of times greater than those at Earth’s surface.

Industry sees momentum building

While negotiations on international regulations continue, new companies are investing heavily in technologies designed to make commercial recovery of polymetallic nodules possible.

Deckelman argued that deep-sea mining is uniquely positioned to address three converging challenges: securing domestic supply chains, meeting surging demand for critical minerals to support the energy transition and supporting industrial development.

Against that backdrop, he sees seabed minerals as “both augmenting and diversifying existing terrestrial sources of critical minerals.”

Developing the technology to recover those minerals has become a significant engineering effort. Exploration relies

on autonomous underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicles  and acoustic imaging, many adapted from the offshore oil and gas sector, said Deckelman.

Collection technologies are advancing as well, with companies increasingly designing systems intended to reduce environmental impacts alongside improving efficiency. On July 6, Deep Sea Minerals Corp. announced a partnership with California-based robotics company Impossible Metals, whose autonomous underwater vehicles use AI-assisted robotic arms to collect individual nodules while avoiding marine organisms and intentionally leaving portions of the seafloor untouched.

According to Deckelman, innovation is occurring throughout the mining value chain. Couple that with increased industry investments and U.S. government support and “we’re seeing this as an industry that is really at a pivotal point right now,” he said. “For decades it has been an industry of the future. For the first time ever, commercial recovery of seabed minerals in the form of polymetallic nodules is a commercial probability.”

Researchers caution, however, that while technology may reduce some environmental impacts, it cannot eliminate them entirely.

“The removing of the nodules—that’s what’s actually being mined,” James said. “You’re removing a habitat.”

One of James’s research areas focuses on sediment plumes. During the process of removing the valuable mineral-rich nodules, collector vehicles discharge excess sediment, creating plumes of sediment that eventually settle back onto the seafloor.

Technology companies designing specialist equipment for deep-sea mining are developing collection systems that could potentially minimize plumes and their resulting environmental stresses.

Finding the balance

The debate over deep-sea mining has become increasingly polarized and is placing Canada under growing scrutiny because The Metals Company US LLC—the subsidiary of the Vancouver-based The Metals Company (TMC)—is pursuing the controversial U.S. permitting pathway for commercial seabed mining.

Canada ratified UNCLOS in November 2003 and has supported the ISA’s efforts to develop a Mining Code and has maintained that commercial mining should not proceed until robust environmental protections are in place. However, it has stopped short of calling for an outright moratorium on deep-sea mining and has said little publicly about TMC’s efforts to seek approval through the U.S. regulatory system.

For Catherine Coumans, research coordinator and Asia-Pacific program coordinator at MiningWatch Canada, that silence is inconsistent with Canada’s obligations under international law. She pointed to Article 139 of UNCLOS, which requires states to ensure that activities carried out by their private companies conform with the convention.

“We’re trying to get the Canadian government to actually acknowledge that it has this obligation,” she said.

In June 2026, MiningWatch Canada launched a parliamentary petition calling on the federal government to clarify its legal responsibilities and address TMC’s efforts to pursue commercial seabed mining through the U.S. permitting process.

Steyn, however, said Canada’s position reflects a difficult legal and diplomatic balancing act.

As a party to UNCLOS, Canada is bound by the convention’s framework and the precautionary principle, which, in international law, means that “when there are unknown consequences that can happen, we have to take all precautionary measures not to create undue harm,” said Steyn. Because TMC submitted its application to NOAA to mine a part of international waters via its U.S. subsidiary in March 2025, under  U.S. law and sovereignty, Canada’s ability to intervene directly is limited. 

Regardless of the laws governing deep-sea mining, the broader challenge, according to James, is that investments in deep-sea research have not kept up with calls for more robust environmental understanding before mining can begin.

“It’s a little frustrating when governments take a stance of ‘we need more scientific information’ but then aren’t putting funds towards that,” she said. “Then the funding is driven by the companies that want to [mine], and it creates this interesting dynamic between [these] companies, scientists who want to find out what’s going on and governments who are just waiting to see what happens.”

James also rejected framing the issue as a simple choice between mining and environmental conservation. “We need to see past these strong views, understand what scientific uncertainties there are and get these regulations made following the precautionary principle,” she said.

“It’s likely that if and when commercial mining starts, we won’t know every single thing that could be an issue. What we can do is have systems in place to quickly deal with and mitigate [issues] as they arise.”