Days After Trump Commits to Seabed Mining, Two Sides Face Off

Less than a week after President Trump signed an executive order to accelerate the mining of seabed, the United States government received its first permission request from the Metal Company, one of the most burning defenders of the practice not yet proven.

On Tuesday, the company’s executive director, Gerard Barron, was also present in Washington for a contentious hearing in front of the Chamber’s Natural Resources Committee. Hey liked the movement of Mr. Trump to a “gun” in the race to extract minerals such as cobalt and nickel of nodules of the size of the potatoes found in the cold, black, black, two and a half depth sand of the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

The members of the Republican and Democratic Committee met how much weight should be given to environmental concerns about practice. The Trump administration has said that it will consider issuing permits for mining in territorial waters of the United States and also in international waters.

Other countries have condemned the United States to essentially avoid international law by saying that it would allow mining of the seabed in waters that almost all other countries consider governing themselves by the international authority of the purse, an independent organization.

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The representative Jared Huffman de California, who is also the committee’s classification democrat, said the metal company and Trump were moving the mining of the seabed of a “cowboy way without collection.” He and other Democrats questioned the case of businesses for cobalt mining and nickel since the manufacturers of electric vehicles, once the main buyers of the metals, moved to batteries that did not use them.

“The financial models of the industry are based on very optimistic assumptions and do not reflect the volatility and reality of world mineral markets,” said representative Maxine E. Dexter, Oregon’s Democrat.

The metal company sought to ensure the committee that any damage to the seabed would be far exceeded by the creation of potential employment and access to minerals whose supply chain currently dominated by China. The company says it has made a decade of expensive environmental studies that support its conclusions.

Trump’s order occurred after years of delays in the International Marine Funds Authority to establish a regulatory framework for the mining of sea beds. It is likely that the authority, created decades ago under the auspices of the United Nations, another deadline is lost this year to encode those rules.

“He took 14 years just to write a mining code,” Barron told the committee, qualifying it as “a deliberate strategy” to slow down the mining of sea beds.

Hey also said that a polymetallic nodule extracted by his company was presented to Mr. Trump recent, and said he was now sitting on the president’s desk in the Oval office.

The United States geological service has been estimated that nodules in a single strip of the Eaastern Pacific, known as the Clarion-Clipperton zone, contain more nickel, cobalt and manganese than all terrestrial reserves. That area, where the metal company proposes to extract, is in the open ocean between Mexico and Hawaii and covers an area approximately half the size of the continental United States.

The Committee’s Chairman, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, Said Seabed Was Needed To Get The United States out from the “Supply Chain Yoke” or China, which currently Processions to Majority of the World’s Cobalt, musal or mys or ou mys, Muhalals, Muhals, Muhalals, Muhalals, Muhalals, Muhalals, Muhalals, Muhalals, Muhals, Muhalals, Muhalals, Muhalals, many, many, many, many, many, very large, many, many, many, many or italals or ijalal or ijsalal or ijalal or ijtalal or ijtalal or ijalal or ijtalal or ijalal or ijalal or ijalal or ijalal or ijalal. or ijtalales. It included the so -called clothes.

China recently imposed export restrictions on some elements of the rare land, leading to fears that US companies that use them to make a variety of advanced electronic products will face shortage.

The Chamber Committee also listened to Thomas Peacock, professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has tasks in part of the studies of the effects of seas mining in the seabed, some of which were financed in part by the metals.

Dr. Peacock said that, although there were potentiax hundreds of unknown species in the Clarion-Clipperton zone and that the specific areas deserved to be cordoned off from mining, “the investigation indicates that some of the impacts proposed the nodules mines.

In particular, it minimized the risks that mining could cause sand feathers and debris that could affect life in the seabed, as well as closer to the surface of the open ocean, where fish like tuna live and feed. The rubble would be “more or less the equivalent of a grain of sand in a fish,” said Dr. Peacock.

Sitting next to Mr. Barron was the executive director of another possible mining of deep waters, impossible metals. Unlike the metal company, which has extraction technology that recess a vacuum attached to an autonomous vehicle that would travel the seabed, sending nodules to a ship through a picke metals that has bet on the seabed.

“Our submarine robots loom to collect the nodules rich in minerals of the seabed through a selective harvest driven by AI,” said Oliver Gunasekara, executive director of impossible metals. “We collect nodules individually avoiding visible life, leaving 60 percent intact.”

The company has re -applied an exploration permit of the American Samoa in the territorial waters of the United States. Mr. Gunasekara said that while a previous application had been denied under the Biden administration, both the American Samoa and Washington were under new leadership and trusted their approval.