NOAA advanced four deep seabed mining applications this summer, covering more than half a million square kilometers of Pacific seabed in total. The Interior Department replaced its two offshore agencies with a new regulator built around critical minerals. In July, an international tribunal ordered the International Seabed Authority to give its own contractors due process, the first time its seabed chamber has ruled in a contested case. Four days later, the ISA renewed the exploration contract at the center of the dispute. Here is where each story stands.
The companies
The Metals Company (Nasdaq: TMC)
TMC remains the most advanced company in the U.S. process. It entered June with its USA B exploration application certified by NOAA, and with its consolidated application, which covers 65,000 square kilometers and seeks both exploration and commercial recovery rights, already in certification review. Its summer news came from the courtroom.
- July 18: the Seabed Disputes Chamber of the Law of the Sea tribunal ordered the ISA to observe due process in its compliance inquiry into TMC’s subsidiaries NORI and TOML. The orders were unanimous.
- July 22: the ISA Council approved a five-year extension of NORI’s exploration contract, to July 2031. The contract would otherwise have expired that day, and the compliance inquiry remains open.
- Ahead: compliance reports to the tribunal are due August 31. NOAA’s permit decision is expected before the end of the first quarter of 2027.
Deep Sea Minerals (CSE: SEAS)
Deep Sea Minerals reached the same substantial compliance milestone as its larger peers, and spent late June explaining exactly what that milestone does and does not mean.
- June 1: NOAA found the company’s application, covering roughly 150,000 square kilometers, in substantial compliance. The finding gives the company priority of right over its area.
- June 7: the company signed a memorandum of understanding with Impossible Metals to evaluate autonomous robotic nodule collection.
- June 26: after a Reuters headline left some investors thinking the application had been rejected, the company put out a statement confirming it remains active and under review.
- Ahead: a full compliance determination, followed by certification.
American Ocean Minerals and Odyssey Marine (Nasdaq: OMEX)
American Ocean Minerals, which is merging with Odyssey Marine Exploration, combined regulatory progress with a heavy season at sea.
- June 24: the company completed Expedition 7 aboard the MV Anuanua Moana.
- July 7: NOAA found the company’s Area-1 application, covering 147,054 square kilometers in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, in substantial compliance.
- July 14: the company reported an AUV survey that captured more than 600,000 seafloor images.
- Ahead: completion of the merger and the next stages of NOAA review.
Eco Minerals (private)
Eco Minerals spent the summer preparing to go public and pushing its NOAA application forward.
- June 29: the company confidentially submitted a draft registration statement for a proposed initial public offering.
- July 7: it filed a consolidated application covering roughly 148,000 square kilometers in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and the Western Pacific near Guam. Its earlier exploration application had already reached full compliance and carries priority of right.
- July 21: its subsidiary Deep Sea Vision located a Pan Am airliner off Puerto Rico that had been lost for 75 years, using the same survey technology the company applies to minerals.
- Ahead: the offering itself, which would add a fourth listed company to the U.S. permitting queue.
GoldCoast Resource (going public via Psyence Group, CSE: PSYG)
GoldCoast is the outlier in this group: a private company exploring for gold, not nodules, in shallow water off Ghana. Its license is in hand: a 10,000 square kilometer reconnaissance license over Ghana’s western continental shelf, granted in January, and the company is advancing a phased program of airborne and seafloor surveys toward a maiden resource estimate. The remaining step is the listing. The amalgamation with Psyence Group, which Psyence shareholders approved in May, has not yet been announced as complete, and an $8.6 million financing closed in March funds the work in the meantime.
- Ahead: completion of the amalgamation, which would list the licensed Ghana project on the CSE with Sir Sam Jonah among its proposed directors.
The Metals Royalty Company (Nasdaq: TMCR)
TMCR is anchored by a 2 percent royalty on NORI’s nodule project, but its summer was driven by its other asset, a terrestrial one: an iron ore royalty in Minnesota.
- June 1: the company closed the $132.5 million acquisition of a 1 percent royalty on the Mesabi Metallics project and exercised an option to acquire a second 1 percent on the same terms.
- July 13: Mesabi completed its first production blast. Commissioning is expected in the second half of 2026.
- Ahead: the option must be funded and closed by July 31.
Where the US regulatory process stands
All of the applications above were filed or advanced under NOAA’s revised regulations, finalized on January 21, which allow a single application to cover both exploration and commercial recovery.
The agencies themselves changed shape mid-summer. BOEM opened public comment on potential mineral leasing offshore Virginia on June 23, one of its final acts. On July 10, the Department of the Interior folded BOEM and BSEE into a new agency, the Marine Minerals Administration, which signed a memorandum of understanding with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on offshore nuclear projects on its first day. On July 17, the MMA published a Proposed Leasing Notice for a mineral lease sale offshore American Samoa, with terms that favor local hiring and use of the Port of Pago Pago. A final notice must be published at least 30 days before a sale, so the sale could still be held this year. It would be the first mineral lease sale on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf since Norton Sound in 1991.
Where the ISA stands
The Council met in Kingston from July 13 to 24 and had the draft mining code in front of it for possible adoption. It did not adopt the code. The session will be remembered instead for the tribunal orders and for the NORI extension. The extension is the more telling of the two: given a chance to let the contract lapse, the Council chose to keep its most advanced contractor inside the treaty system while the dispute is decided.
Politics set the tempo on both tracks. The G7 leaders’ declaration at Evian on June 17 committed members to cut dependence on any single outside supplier of rare earths and permanent magnets below 60 percent by 2030, and every nodule application filed this summer leans on that logic. In Washington, the November 3 midterms explain the urgency: each applicant wants to be as far into the process as possible before the political environment can shift.
The rest of the world
China made no headline this summer to match Washington’s, but it sits on the other side of all of them. It holds five ISA exploration contracts covering roughly 225,000 square kilometers, more than any other member state, which made it the largest stakeholder in the room as the Council worked through the mining code in July. Its bid to host the new High Seas Treaty secretariat in Xiamen remained unresolved through the summer, and its research fleet stayed under scrutiny in Washington after a spring investigation by Mongabay and CNN found the ships spent only about 6 percent of their sea time in China’s own contract areas.
Japan gave the summer its last headline. On Friday, Tokyo said it will run full-scale mining tests at Minamitori Island in February 2027, building on a milestone from earlier this year, when its drilling vessel Chikyu recovered about 50 tonnes of rare earth bearing mud from 6,000 meters of water, the first continuous recovery from that depth. Prime Minister Takaichi has said Japan and the United States are considering developing the deposit together.
The Cook Islands stayed in the background of the summer’s American news, but much of that news points its way. Its nodule fields lie in national waters rather than under ISA jurisdiction, American Ocean Minerals is invested there, and American Samoa’s government has said openly that it wants the territory to become a transshipment hub for Cook Islands material on its way to the United States.
Scheduled and expected catalysts
- July 27 to 31: the ISA Assembly meets in Kingston, where moratorium proponents will press their case.
- July 31: TMCR’s deadline to close the second Mesabi royalty.
- August 31: NORI, TOML and the ISA file compliance reports with the tribunal.
- Second half of 2026: the MMA’s final Leasing Notice, and potentially the American Samoa lease sale itself; the Eco Minerals IPO; completion of the Psyence and GoldCoast amalgamation; commissioning at Mesabi.
- November 3: U.S. midterm elections.
- February 2027: Japan’s full-scale mining test at Minamitori Island.
- By the end of the first quarter of 2027: NOAA’s decision on TMC’s commercial recovery permit.
