Nobody Has Permission to Mine the Deep Sea. One Company Expects a Permit by Early 2027.

Two things happened on the international seabed over the past year. They point in opposite directions.

The International Seabed Authority has approved no mining. Its Mining Code — the rulebook that would govern commercial extraction — remains unfinished and deeply contested. Talks ended in stalemate. Benefit-sharing, liability, and environmental compensation are all unresolved.

On 21 January 2026, the United States published a final rule streamlining permit applications for hard mineral mining in international waters — allowing an applicant to seek an exploration licence and a commercial recovery permit simultaneously. NOAA has announced that an application from The Metals Company (TMC USA) is fully compliant with its regulations. TMC expects a permit to mine by the first quarter of 2027.

How can a country permit mining in waters it doesn't own?

This is the question the story turns on, and the answer is jurisdictional.

The international seabed — "the Area" — is governed under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which established the ISA to regulate it as the common heritage of mankind. Extraction is supposed to require an ISA contract under an agreed code.

The United States is not a party to UNCLOS. It signed but never ratified; the Senate has never given its advice and consent, across four decades and both parties. The US therefore does not accept that the ISA has authority over it, and issues seabed permits under its own domestic statute instead.

So there is no contradiction in the legal sense. There are two parallel systems: one multilateral and unfinished, one domestic and now streamlined. Whether the second is lawful with respect to the first is precisely the argument.

The practical effect is straightforward. A company that cannot get an ISA contract may not need one.

The scale of what is already licensed

Exploration is not mining, and the distinction matters — but the footprint is established.

As of 31 January 2026, the ISA had issued 31 exploration contracts, of which 17 are for polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone — a Pacific abyssal plain between Hawai'i and Mexico, roughly the size of Europe.

Polymetallic nodules are potato-sized lumps of manganese, nickel, cobalt and copper that sit loose on the seabed surface. They took millions of years to form, accreting at a few millimetres per million years. Collecting them does not require drilling — a machine drives along the bottom and picks them up.

That is why the deep sea is attractive: the metals are lying on the floor, and they are metals that batteries need.

It is also why the ecological argument is unusually sharp. The nodules are the habitat. They are the only hard surface on a vast plain of sediment, and the organisms attached to them have nowhere else to be. You cannot harvest the nodules and leave the nodule ecosystem, because the nodule is the ecosystem.

40 nations want a pause

A coalition of 40 nations backs a moratorium, alongside businesses, financial institutions, human rights experts, Indigenous leaders, scientists, fishing associations and civil society organisations.

Their argument is not primarily that deep-sea mining is certainly catastrophic. It is that nobody knows, and that the baseline research to find out has not been done. The abyssal plain is among the least-studied environments on Earth. Most species there are undescribed. A disturbance to sediment that settles over millennia is, on any human timescale, permanent.

The counter-argument deserves stating properly, because it is not frivolous: the energy transition needs nickel and cobalt at volume; terrestrial mining for those metals carries documented human and environmental costs, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and if the seabed can supply them with a smaller total footprint, refusing to look is its own choice with its own casualties.

That argument is real. It is also, at present, unresolvable on the evidence — which is the moratorium camp's actual point.

Why this connects to the High Seas Treaty

When we wrote about the High Seas Treaty entering into force, we noted that the BBNJ Agreement is explicit that it should not undermine existing bodies — including the ISA — and that critics argue this compromise leaves the hardest conflicts unresolved.

This is that conflict, arriving on schedule.

The world spent twenty years negotiating a treaty to protect biodiversity in international waters. It entered into force in January 2026. Three days later, a permit pathway to mine those same international waters was streamlined under national law, outside the framework the treaty defers to.

The treaty creates the power to designate protected areas in the high seas. Not one exists yet. The first BBNJ Conference of the Parties has not convened. A commercial mining permit is expected in Q1 2027.

Those two timelines are not going to arrive in a useful order.

What we do not know

We are not going to tell you deep-sea mining will destroy the ocean. We do not know that, and neither does anyone else — which is, again, the point.

What is on the record: no ISA approval, no finished code, 31 exploration contracts, 40 nations seeking a pause, one streamlined national permit pathway, one compliant application, and a company's own expectation of a mining permit by early 2027.

The next ISA Council meeting is in July 2026. The ISA Secretary-General has expressed optimism that member states will keep making progress.

Why this is on AEDO1

The abyssal plain is the largest habitat on the planet and the least seen. Almost nothing that lives there has a name.

The decision about whether to mine it is being made now — not by the body created to make it, and not on the basis of knowing what is down there. That is worth recording accurately while it happens, because in twenty years the question of who decided, and on what evidence, will be asked.