Nearly 40 nations, big and small, have voiced opposition to a plan by a Wall Street-backed mining company to team up with the Trump administration to circumvent international law and start seabed mining in the Pacific Ocean with a U.S. permit.
The widespread furor reflected a rare alignment from countries as varied as China, Russia, India, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Indonesia, France, Argentina, Uganda and the small island nations of Mauritius and Fiji. The plan also brought to the fore a pitched clash over who regulates seabed mining in international waters.
The pushback emerged after The Metals Company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, disclosed on Thursday that it would ask the Trump administration through a United States subsidiary to grant it approval for mining in international waters. Under an international treaty, the International Seabed Authority has jurisdiction over any mining on the so-called high seas.
“Any unilateral action would constitute a violation of international law and directly undermine the fundamental principles of multilateralism, the peaceful use of the oceans and the collective governance framework,” Leticia Carvalho, the secretary general of the seabed authority, said in a statement released Friday.
Diplomats backed up Ms. Carvalho, arguing that the surprise proposal threatened a global effort to share in the wealth from any metals buried on the seabed floor, which are expected to be used to build electric car batteries and other industrial products.
“It is the Authority that has the exclusive mandate to regulate the exploration and exploitation of mineral resources in the area,” Carl Grainger, Ireland’s representative, said.
The Metals Company turned to the Trump administration after growing increasingly frustrated with how long it has taken the Seabed Authority to complete environmental and financial regulations that will govern seabed mining. The agency has said that those standards are needed before issuing its first commercial mining permit.
Gerard Barron, the company’s chairman, said that he wanted to start mining in international waters by 2027 and that he was convinced the United States had the legal right to issue a permit on its own.
“The freedom to mine the deep seabed, like the freedom of navigation, is a high seas freedom enjoyed by all nations,” Mr. Barron said.
The Trump administration’s Commerce Department, in a statement to The New York Times late Friday, confirmed that it disagreed with the Seabed Authority’s interpretation of international law.
“Companies can apply for exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits for deep-sea mining in ocean areas beyond national jurisdiction,” Maureen O’Leary, a department spokeswoman said, citing a 1980 federal law, the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act. It has never previously been used to authorize industrial-scale ocean mining.
Ms. O’Leary added that the U.S. subsidiary of The Metals Company had started consulting with the Commerce Department over deep-sea mining plans.
“The process ensures a thorough environmental impact review, interagency consultations and opportunity for public comment,” Ms. O’Leary said, suggesting that the permit approval would not be automatic.
Each nation already controls its own coastal areas, which are considered to reach about 200 nautical miles from the shore, and certain countries such as Japan, Norway and the Cook Islands have recently considered allowing seabed mining in these national areas.
But the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which went into effect in 1994, established the International Seabed Authority and granted it the power to decide when and where seabed mining can take place in international waters, which cover nearly half the world’s surface.
In the decades since, more than two dozen contracts have been granted by the agency for exploratory work, extracting small quantities of seabed rocks from the ocean floor, including to the Metals Company, which teamed up with the small island nations of Nauru and Tonga.
The company’s contract sites are about 1,000 miles off the coast of Mexico, where the ocean is about 2.5 miles deep, in a region known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. There the seabed floor is sprinkled with potato-size rocks that have large quantities of nickel, manganese, copper, zinc, cobalt and other minerals.
The Metals Company has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars doing exploratory work. But it has become clear that the rules will not be ready for at least several more years, and the company is running low on cash and even available borrowing authority.
“We believe we have sufficient knowledge to get started and prove we can manage environmental risks,” Mr. Barron said, adding that the company planned to ask the United States to approve mining in these same areas.
The Law of the Sea has been ratified by more than 165 nations, but one major exception is the United States. Dating back to the Reagan administration, there were concerns related to seabed mining provisions and how they might limit mining by American companies.
But the United States successfully negotiated changes to the treaty in the 1990s to try to address these concerns. In the decades since, the State Department has sent representatives to meetings at the Seabed Authority’s headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, creating the impression that the United States intends to honor the terms of the treaty, even though the Senate never formally ratified it.
President Trump has already shown a willingness to challenge international norms. He has proposed that the United States take over Greenland or even Canada to increase access to critical minerals needed to fuel manufacturing in the United States, and perhaps even the Panama Canal to more cheaply move American manufactured goods.
The Metals Company executives have confidentially been meeting with Trump White House and Commerce Department officials to prepare this plan.
Mr. Barron, in an interview and statement he prepared for The Times, said he believed that the Seabed Authority has been constrained by environmental groups like Greenpeace. Such organizations, he said, “see deep-sea mining industry as their ‘last green trophy’ and have worked tirelessly to continuously delay the adoption of the exploitation regulations with the explicit intent of killing commercial industry.”
He also argued that the authority’s delay in finishing the seabed mining rules had violated the terms of the international agreement.
Such arguments have not been well received by the Seabed Authority and its member states: More than 30 nations have argued that there still is not enough evidence that seabed mining can take place without causing unacceptable harm to the environment.
Even nations like China, India, Poland and Norway — which have been more supportive of moving more quickly to start industrial-scale mining in international waters — have joined to object to the proposal by The Metals Company.
A license granted by the Trump administration to The Metals Company could give the company a head start on these nations, potentially flooding the marketplace with metals like nickel and copper and undermining plans by these other nations to mine the ocean on their own.
“At this critical moment in history, it is more important for us to be united in continuing to demonstrate the effectiveness and vitality of the seabed regime,” a Chinese government official said in a statement read at a Seabed Authority meeting on Friday.
