- An influential group of former U.S. government officials and military officers — including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta — urged Senators to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (UNCLOS), so “The United States can take its seat on the Council of the International Seabed Authority”, and “resume its leading role in oceans matters.”
- As commercial mining regulations near adoption by the ISA, the officials wrote a letter to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations urging a formal vote on ratifying the Law of the Sea treaty, which has provided the U.S. the largest exclusive economic zone and continental shelf jurisdiction globally and would ensure freedom of navigation for American ships and aircraft.
- UNCLOS ratification remains a legislative uncertainty for the U.S., but the country can still potentially process and refine nodules through allied countries and contractors, and TMC’s offshore exploration and onshore processing campaigns have involved a wide array of American companies and universities.
NEW YORK - March 14, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TMC the metals company Inc. (Nasdaq: TMC) (“TMC” or the “Company”), an explorer of the world’s largest estimated undeveloped source of critical battery metals, today welcomed a letter from around 350 former U.S. government officials and military officers urging the U.S. Senate to re-evaluate a formal vote on ratifying the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) treaty.
The letter, which follows this week’s introduction of the Responsible Use of Seafloor Resources Act (RUSRA) in Congress, was signed by around 189 American ambassadors, 73 generals, 50 admirals, four directors of national intelligence and scores of other distinguished supporters. The co-signatories warned how “China and Russia have taken advantage of our absence to work actively to undermine critical United States economic and national security interests,” and that the U.S. had “already lost two of our four ‘USA’ designated deep seabed mine sites, each containing a trillion dollars in value of the strategic minerals of copper, nickel, cobalt, manganese and rare earths” needed for national security and the energy transition.
Since the turn of the decade, increasing U.S. investment in and prioritization of offshore mineral exploration has been codified through the formation of various bodies including the National Ocean Mapping, Exploration, and Characterization (NOMEC) Council in 2020, the Ocean Policy Committee (OPC) formed via direction of the National Defense Authorization Act in 2021, and the declaration of outer limits of the U.S. extended continental shelf in 2023 which declared U.S. rights to approximately one million square kilometers of subsea territory in an effort to protect future economic opportunities.
Although the U.S. has yet to ratify UNCLOS — a legislative step that would enable it to access the vast, untapped critical minerals found in seafloor nodules in international waters — it can still process and refine critical minerals extracted from polymetallic nodules collected in international waters.
In December 2023, President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act, through which the House Armed Services Committee directed the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy to submit a report to the Committee to assess “the processing of seabed resources of polymetallic nodules domestically.”
About The Metals Company
The Metals Company is an explorer of lower-impact battery metals from seafloor polymetallic nodules, on a dual mission: (1) supply metals for the global energy transition with the least possible negative impacts on planet and people and (2) trace, recover and recycle the metals we supply to help create a metals commons that can be used in perpetuity. The Company through its subsidiaries holds exploration and commercial rights to three polymetallic nodule contract areas in the Clarion Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean regulated by the International Seabed Authority and sponsored by the governments of Nauru, Kiribati and the Kingdom of Tonga.
