Yusuf Khan of The Wall Street Journal reports that the possibility of harvesting the seabed is growing in popularity among lawmakers amid a push to extract rare minerals for defense applications. Khan writes:
Mining the ocean floor for minerals often seemed like a fantasy, but U.S. national security concerns could be bringing it closer to reality.
Thousands of feet down at the bottom of the ocean, small rocks holding vast quantities of nickel, manganese and cobalt—the perfect combination of minerals to make an electric-vehicle battery—sit untouched, as high costs to reach them, a lack of research and public opposition have kept deep-sea mining a pipe dream.
Lobbying efforts seeking governmental approval to mine the seabed for EV battery metals often fell on deaf ears, but backers have found a way to appeal to lawmakers—as a source of cobalt for U.S. weapons makers that avoids Chinese suppliers, building on efforts to decouple from the Asian superpower. […]
Asghedom said that mineral extraction tends to bring conflict, especially in places like Latin America, and the “unconventional, untested approach” in deep-sea mining could make conflict even more common.
Read more here.
