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At the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, about 5,500 meters deep — where the pressure is 550 times greater than at the surface, the temperature is close to zero, and no sunlight reaches — billions of potato-sized nodules are scattered. Each of them contains nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese: precisely the minerals the world needs to manufacture electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, and energy storage systems. Deep-sea mining is no longer science fiction: companies are sending multi-ton robots to this depth to vacuum up these nodules — and the debate over whether this is necessary, safe, or ethical is dividing governments, scientists, and global industry.
Brazil is at the center of this dispute, but for reasons opposite to what you might imagine. The country is one of the leaders in international resistance to commercial-scale deep-sea mining — but at the same time, it maintains an exploration contract in the South Atlantic and has direct economic interests in the appreciation of critical minerals found on the ocean floor. It’s a contradiction that reveals much about how 21st-century resource geopolitics works.
Interest in deep-sea mining accelerated dramatically after 2022, when China — which dominates between 60% and 85% of global processing of critical minerals like cobalt and rare earths — began to signal possible export restrictions. The West panicked. Suddenly, the Pacific seabed ceased to be a scientific curiosity and became the object of a strategic race among industrial powers that do not want to depend on China to build their energy transition.
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The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, in the central Pacific (between Mexico and Hawaii), concentrates the highest known density of polymetallic nodules on the planet. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the seabed in this region contains more nickel and cobalt than all known terrestrial reserves combined.
The International Seabed Authority (ISA) estimates that in Clarion-Clipperton alone there are over 21 billion tons of nodules — including nearly 6 billion tons of manganese, 270 million tons of nickel, and 230 million tons of copper. These are numbers that make any supply chain manager’s eyes spin. And also any oceanographer’s eyes — in horror.
How deep-sea mining robots work
Deep-sea mining operations rely on two types of equipment: autonomous underwater collectors and surface production vessels. The Canadian company The Metals Company (TMC) is one of the most advanced in developing this system, in partnership with Allseas, a marine engineering firm that developed the Hidden Gem — described as the world’s first deep-sea mineral production vessel.
The collection process works as follows: collectors are lowered through 5,500-meter pipes to the ocean floor, where they vacuum nodules from the seabed. More than 90% of the captured sediments are separated inside the collector and returned to the bottom, behind the machine, to minimize disturbances. The nodules ascend through the vertical piping system to the vessel on the surface. In each operation, about 35 metric tons of material are recovered per run.
- Target zone: Clarion-Clipperton Zone, central Pacific, between Mexico and Hawaii
- Depth: 4,500 to 5,500 meters below the surface
- Nodules: potato-sized, containing nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese
- Estimated reserves: over 21 billion tons in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone
- Operation: autonomous collectors + vertical piping + surface vessel
- Leading company: The Metals Company (TMC), partnership with Allseas (Hidden Gem vessel)
The American company Impossible Metals is developing a different approach: autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that collect nodules with more selective robotic arms, leaving as much of the seabed ecosystem intact as possible. Their most advanced model, the Eureka III, can carry up to 4,000 kg of nodules per immersion — a capacity of almost 4 tons. The company plans an initial fleet of six such machines by 2026.
The economic viability of deep-sea mining depends on a calculation that changes with mineral prices on the surface. With cobalt prices high, the investment pays off. With depressed prices — as happened in 2023 and 2024 with the oversupply of Congolese cobalt — the equation becomes tighter. This volatility explains why companies in the sector seek long-term contracts with governments before starting commercial operations, ensuring revenue regardless of market fluctuations.
Logistics are also challenging. A nickel nodule needs to be extracted at 5,500 meters, brought to the surface, transported to a port, processed in a refinery, and then transformed into a final product. Each step has costs, risks, and complexity. Pioneering companies estimate that the operational costs of deep-sea mining are already competitive with terrestrial mining in remote regions — but environmental and regulatory costs are still an unknown.
The regulation that doesn’t exist — and why it matters for deep-sea mining
The race for deep-sea minerals has a fundamental problem: the international mining code is not yet finalized. The ISA (International Seabed Authority), headquartered in Jamaica, is the UN body responsible for regulating the exploration of the seabed in international waters. It has already issued 31 exploration licenses — but the rules for commercial exploitation have been debated since 2021.
In March 2026, the ISA concluded Part I of its 31st session without approving commercial exploitation activities. The mining code remains unfinished and contested. Meanwhile, the Trump administration signed an executive order (“Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources”) in April 2025, unilaterally accelerating American licenses for deep-sea mining in international waters — without waiting for ISA approval.
In January 2026, NOAA (the American oceanic agency) finalized the rules for granting commercial licenses under this new policy — creating a system parallel to ISA’s that could set a precedent for other countries to also ignore the multilateral body. If this happens, the governance of deep-sea mining in international waters could collapse before it is established.
TMC has already applied, in April 2025, for commercial recovery permits covering over 25,000 km² of ocean floor and two exploration licenses totaling nearly 200,000 km² additional. If approved, operations could begin around 2027.
Environmental risks that scientists cannot yet quantify
Opposition to deep-sea mining is broad, technically grounded, and politically growing. Forty years after an experimental mining expedition in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the site had still not fully recovered. Two months after experimental seabed scraping, the count of marine organisms dropped by 37% — and ripple effects in the food chain were recorded even in the upper layers of the water column, with plankton ingesting sediment particles instead of nutrients.
The problem is that no one knows exactly what the impact will be on a commercial scale — because it has never been done on a commercial scale. The experimental mining that exists so far is a minimal fraction of what companies propose. Scientific models cannot confidently predict the behavior of sediment plumes generated by mining, which can disperse for hundreds of kilometers and disturb ecosystems completely distinct from the extraction area.
To gauge the unknown: it is estimated that the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the main target of deep-sea mining, harbors between 6 and 8 billion species of organisms — most of which are not yet cataloged by science. Scraping this seabed on an industrial scale means destroying life forms that humanity doesn’t even know exist. This radical uncertainty is the central argument of scientists calling for a moratorium: one cannot assess the damage of something that has not even been described.
There is also an economic environmental argument rarely discussed: deep-sea nodules accumulate calcium carbonate over millions of years and are part of the ocean’s CO₂ absorption cycle. Disturbing them on a large scale could interfere with the oceans’ ability to act as carbon sinks — accelerating global warming instead of providing minerals to combat it. The irony would be perfect: destroying the solution while building the solution.
Since 2025, 32 countries have declared support for some form of moratorium, precautionary pause, or ban on deep-sea mining. These include Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Canada, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Switzerland, Mexico, and most Pacific island nations. The World Resources Institute’s analysis of deep-sea mining points out that the risks to oceanic food chains — which feed over 3 billion people globally — are still largely unknown.
Brazil in the dispute: against mining but with its own reserves in the Atlantic
Brazil’s position in the deep-sea mining debate is tellingly contradictory. President Lula publicly stated that the country cannot allow “a predatory race” for ocean resources — and Brazil signed international declarations calling for a precautionary pause. But at the same time, the Mineral Resources Research Company (CPRM) has maintained an exploration contract with ISA itself for an area in the South Atlantic since 2015.
The target is the Rio Grande Rise, about 1,200 km southeast of the Brazilian coast — an underwater geological formation with deposits of cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts. In 2018, Brazil asked the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf to include the Rio Grande Rise within the extended Brazilian continental shelf.
If approved, the request would give Brazil exclusive jurisdiction over these resources without needing an ISA license — which is, in essence, the same unilateral logic that Brazil criticizes when applied by the U.S. The difference is that the Brazilian request goes through the multilateral UN process, while Washington is acting by executive decree.
There is also an economic dimension that explains Brazilian ambiguity. Brazil holds about 10% of the world’s terrestrial reserves of lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths. If deep-sea mining advances globally and floods the market with low-priced cobalt and nickel, this would depress the prices of mineral commodities — directly harming Brazil’s royalty revenue from its terrestrial mining.
This is exactly the same logic that makes the race for rare earths in Minas Gerais so strategic for Brazil: the more countries that can obtain critical minerals from alternative sources (including the deep sea), the less negotiating power the country has over its terrestrial reserves. Economic logic and environmental logic coincide, in this case, in Brazil’s resistance to the accelerated advance of oceanic mining.
The debate over deep-sea mining will intensify in 2026 and 2027, when the first commercial operations may begin — with or without ISA’s approval, if the U.S. decides to move unilaterally. For Brazil, the issue has three layers: environmental (risk to oceanic ecosystems), economic (impact on prices of minerals the country extracts on land), and geopolitical (the South Atlantic as a zone of strategic interest). According to RAND Corporation analysis, deep-sea mining could produce volumes of nickel and cobalt equivalent to the entire projected U.S. demand in 2040 — which explains why Washington is willing to risk conflict with ISA to move forward. Brazil observes, with reservations, a race that could redefine both the geopolitics of critical minerals and the future of the planet’s oceans.
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