Donald Trump has signed a controversial decree aimed at intensifying high-sea exploitation in the United States and international waters.
Thursday’s order is the last issued by the American president to try to increase the United States access to the minerals used by the aerospace, green and health technology sectors.
The deep sea contains billions of tons of potato -shaped rocks, called polymetallic nodules, which are rich in critical minerals such as cobalt and rare earths.
Many other countries and environmental groups oppose the extraction of the deep sea in international waters without other research.
The latest American decree was issued to “establish the United States as a world leader in exploration of minerals from responsible seabed,” he said.
This decision seems to be bypassing a long series of United Nations negotiations on mining in international waters.
“US authorization … violates international law and harms the overall interests of the international community,” the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Guo Jiakun said on Friday.
China dominates the production of rare earths and critical metals such as cobalt and lithium.
Trump was frustrated by this relative weakness of the American position, according to analysts.
“We want the United States to become standing on China in this resource space under the ocean, on the bottom of the ocean,” an American official said on Thursday.
To achieve this, the order indicates that the United States will accelerate the process of emission exploration licenses and recovery permits both in its own waters and in “areas beyond national jurisdiction”.
The administration estimates that operating on the high seas could increase the country’s GDP by $ 300 billion (225 billion pounds sterling) over 10 years and create 100,000 jobs
The EU, the United Kingdom and others support a moratorium on practice until new scientific research is carried out.
Environmentalists and scientists fear that non -discovery species living in the deep sea can be injured by the process.
“Exploitation on the high seas is a deeply dangerous company for our ocean,” said Jeff Watters of Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group based in the United States.
“The damage caused by deep shelter exploitation is not limited to the bottom of the ocean: this will have an impact on the entire water column, from top to bottom, and everyone who holds it back,” he added in a press release published on Friday.
It is not clear how fast the exploitation of the deep magnitude could begin, but a mining company, the metal company (TMC), is already under discussion with the American government to obtain permits.
TMC CEO Gerard Barron previously said that he hoped to start exploiting at the end of the year.
With others in the mining industry, he challenges the environmental claims made and argued that the abyssal area – 3,000 m at 6,000 m under sea level – has very low concentrations of life.
“Here, there is no flora. And if we measure the quantity of fauna (animal life), in the form of biomass, there are about 10 g per square meter. This is compared to more than 30 kg of biomass where the world pushes more nickel extraction, which is our equatorial tropical forests”, he previously told the BBC.
A recent article published by the Natural History Museum and the National Oceanography Center examined the long -term impacts of the exploitation of the deep mothers of a test carried out in the 1970s.
He concluded that some creatures living by sediments have been able to recolonize the site and recover from the test, but the largest animals did not seem to have returned.
Scientists concluded that it could have been because there were no more nodules for them. The polymetallic nodules where minerals are found millions of years to train and therefore cannot be easily replaced.
