The Chinese translation is being made; the original is shown for now.
Published: October 20, 2026 |
NOAA has certified two exploration license applications covering roughly 25,000 square miles of international Pacific waters, the clearest sign yet that the U.S. is serious about pulling cobalt and nickel off the ocean floor instead of out of China’s supply chain.
American Metal’s two subsidiaries, SeaX and American Metal Resources, just cleared a major checkpoint in the federal permitting process that could make the United States the first country to commercially mine the deep seabed. NOAA confirmed this month that both companies’ applications are fully compliant with the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act and its regulations. That certification moves the applications into environmental review: the last major hurdle before a license can actually be issued.
Combined, the two applications stake a claim to roughly 65,000 square kilometers, or about 25,000 square miles, of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area roughly the size of West Virginia. That’s a stretch of international seabed between Hawaii and Mexico. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, it holds more cobalt, nickel, and manganese than every known deposit on land put together.
None of this is happening by accident. On April 24, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order called Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources, directing NOAA to speed up exactly this kind of review. China had just tightened export controls on rare earth materials used in EV batteries and electronics. The administration’s own officials have been blunt about the math: China controls more than 80 percent of global rare earth processing. The metals sitting in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, mainly nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese, feed both EV batteries and the chips powering the AI buildout. An administration official has put the total haul in U.S. waters alone at more than a billion metric tons of polymetallic nodules, the potato-sized rocks that litter the seafloor there.
American Metal isn’t working this alone. The Metals Company, led by CEO Gerard Barron, has its own exploration license applications moving through NOAA for two separate CCZ areas, after years spent pursuing an international permit through the Jamaica-based International Seabed Authority instead. A third firm, Eco Minerals, is also mid-process. NOAA published its notice of these competing applications in the Federal Register back in March. A 60-day public comment period tied to the filings closes this week, on October 19, with a virtual public hearing already held on October 13.
That compressed timeline is itself the story. NOAA issued a final rule on January 21, 2026, that folded what used to be a two-stage license-and-permit process into one: a procedural change built specifically to get companies like American Metal through faster. According to reporting from Mining.com, the SeaX and AMR applications overlap partly with reserved areas the International Seabed Authority had already designated, and with a portion of a competing company’s filing. Nobody fully owns this seafloor yet, and the U.S. process is racing ahead of any international consensus on who gets to.
Impossible Metals is taking a different route entirely. The California company is run by CEO Oliver Gunasekara. It built a robotic, AI-guided claw system designed to pick nodules off the seafloor with less disturbance. It’s pursuing a permit through the ISA instead, with sponsorship from Bahrain, the first Middle Eastern country to back a deep-sea mining bid. The company says that international permit path requires a five-year environmental review costing $70 million. That figure puts NOAA’s faster domestic track in sharp relief.
An exploration license, if American Metal eventually gets one, doesn’t authorize mining. It lets the company survey the CCZ, test equipment, and gather the data needed to later apply for an actual extraction permit. NOAA still has to complete its environmental study first. That review is where the real fight over this industry will play out: marine scientists have warned for years that scraping nodules off the ocean floor could wipe out ecosystems nobody has finished cataloging, let alone understood well enough to say how they’d recover.
Frankly, the certification is a procedural step, not a green light to start digging.
But it’s the step that turns an executive order into a company with a real claim on a real patch of ocean floor, and that’s further than any American company has gotten before.
Source: Startup Fortune
Be in-the-know when you’re on-the-go!
FREE eNews delivery service to your email twice-weekly. With a focus on lead-driven news, our news service will help you develop new business contacts on an on-going basis.
CLICK HERE to register your email address.