What the Seabed Mining Stalemate Means for Cobalt and Nickel

The ocean floor holds nickel, cobalt, and copper deposits that rival the largest reserves ever found on land. Yet as of September 2026, not a single commercial extraction permit exists anywhere in international waters.

The bottleneck is not technology, and it is not capital. Both already exist. The obstacle is a United Nations regulatory body whose member states cannot agree on the rules that would let any of it happen.

That standoff has direct consequences for the battery metals you follow. Cobalt and nickel are core inputs for electric vehicle cathodes, and the question of whether the seabed opens up is now a live variable in how those markets get priced.

This is an explainer on deep sea mining: what is actually down there, why the regulatory fight is stuck, who is positioned to profit, and what a single permit decision would mean for the metals that power the energy transition. By the time you finish, you will be able to read an ISA council session the way a trader reads a central bank statement.

What lies on the ocean floor, and why it matters for battery metals

The seabed does not hold one type of mineral deposit. It holds three, and each one contains a different mix of metals, forms in a different way, and presents its own extraction problem.

Polymetallic nodules are the headline resource. These are potato-sized lumps resting directly on the seafloor at abyssal depths, and they contain manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt. Because they sit on the surface rather than buried in rock, collecting them requires no blasting or excavation.

Seafloor massive sulphides are the second category. They form around hydrothermal vents, where superheated, mineral-rich water escapes the ocean floor and builds chimney-like structures. These deposits concentrate copper, zinc, gold, and silver.

Cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts are the third. They build up over millions of years on the slopes and summits of underwater mountains, holding cobalt, platinum group metals, and manganese.

The reason these particular metals matter is the battery. Nickel and cobalt are essential to lithium-ion cathode chemistries, copper wires nearly every electrified system, and manganese features in several cathode formulations. What is on the seabed maps almost precisely onto what the energy transition needs.

Why the Clarion-Clipperton Zone is the commercial focal point

The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) is a vast stretch of the Pacific seabed between Hawaii and Mexico, and it is where nearly all serious commercial attention sits. Exploration data indicates its nodule fields hold nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese in quantities that rival or exceed known terrestrial reserves.

That scale is the whole point. If the CCZ were ever unlocked, it would not top up global supply at the margins; it would function as a structural shift in where the world sources its battery metals.

Nodules also happen to be the most accessible of the three deposit types, because they can be collected off the surface rather than mined out of rock. That combination, enormous scale plus low technical difficulty, is why the regulatory fight matters so much.

The ISA deadlock: a regulatory body that cannot agree on the rules

Here is the structural reality. As of 15 September 2026, there is no finalised Mining Code and no commercial exploitation contract anywhere in international waters. The gate is closed, and no one has agreed on the key.

The gatekeeper is the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN-affiliated body with jurisdiction over seabed minerals in the Area, meaning international waters beyond any single country’s control. Its governance runs on consensus, which is both the source of its legitimacy and the reason it is stuck.

At Part II of the ISA Council’s 30th session in July 2025, the 36-member Council adopted a thematic approach to unresolved issues and made progress on compliance and Regional Environmental Management Plans. What it did not do was finalise the Mining Code or set a deadline for completing it.

Over 30 outstanding regulatory matters remain unresolved, from environmental baseline data requirements to liability rules.

Those open questions are not trivial. They include thresholds for permissible environmental harm, compliance and enforcement mechanisms, insurance and liability requirements, and the treatment of underwater cultural heritage. Until they are settled, no extraction permit framework can exist.

For anyone with capital or supply chain exposure tied to seabed metals, the shift to an open-ended, thematic work programme is the signal that matters. It tells you resolution is not imminent, and that this is a multi-year uncertainty rather than a near-term catalyst.

The ISA negotiations in July 2026 produced no Mining Code deadline, leaving the thematic work programme as the only active output from a session that many contractors had expected to move the permitting timeline closer to resolution.

Geopolitical fault lines inside the ISA

The deadlock is not just technical. It runs along national fault lines, and the Pacific Island nations, despite shared geography and climate exposure, sit on opposite sides.

Supporting responsible development, and acting as sponsoring states for mining contractors:

• Nauru
• Cook Islands
• Tonga
• Kiribati

Backing a moratorium or precautionary pause:

• Federated States of Micronesia
• Fiji
• Palau
• Samoa
• Tuvalu
• Vanuatu

The sponsoring state model is what creates this split. A contractor needs a country to sponsor its licence, which ties commercial ambitions directly to shifting domestic politics in small island states.

A further layer of complexity comes from nations with their own terrestrial mining interests, such as the UK, Norway, and Mexico. Their positions raise questions about whether some resistance to seabed mining is grounded in environmental caution or economic protectionism of land-based supply.

The geopolitical dimension of seabed resource access extends beyond the Pacific Island sponsoring state model, with China’s state-backed programmes developing extraction technology and ISA contracts in parallel, creating a competitive dynamic that sits beneath most Western policy discussions of the sector.

The geology and ecology argument: what mining would actually disturb

The environmental debate is not a separate story bolted onto the regulation. It is the scientific foundation the ISA’s entire rulemaking process is built on, and it deserves to be presented from both sides.

Research across the CCZ in 2024 and 2025 has identified three primary mechanisms of harm:

• Biodiversity loss: Removing the extremely slow-growing nodules eliminates the hard-substratum habitat that many species depend on.
• Sediment plumes and compaction: Collection machinery compacts remaining sediment and throws up plumes that settle over surrounding areas, altering food sources.
• Biogeochemical disruption: Nodules host distinct microbial communities involved in carbon cycling and seafloor oxygen production, and removing them carries unknown wider consequences.

The data behind these findings is specific. A 2025 collector trial recorded a 37% decrease in macrofaunal densities within the collector path. Industrial trials in 2024 found that nodule-rich areas outside the direct mining track still received 2-3 cm of sediment deposition, extending disturbance well beyond the mined strip.

The peer-reviewed macrofaunal density findings from a 2025 industrial trial, published via PubMed by researchers at the Natural History Museum and University of Southampton, also recorded a 32% reduction in species richness within mining tracks, reinforcing the case that even pilot-scale operations produce measurable ecological harm.

The recovery problem is what makes these figures weigh so heavily. Nodules grow over millions of years, so habitat recovery timescales are effectively geological. What is removed does not come back on any human horizon.

Proponents make a spatial counter-argument, and it deserves its full hearing.

An August 2025 brief to the UN Scientific Advisory Board estimated that a 30-year deep-sea mining operation would directly affect roughly 0.2% of the CCZ seabed area and less than 0.01% of its volume.

That the 37% density reduction shows up even in pilot-scale trials is precisely why a growing coalition of scientists and nations wants a regulatory pause rather than provisional approval. And this science is not separable from the money. The ESG exclusion wave that has locked out trillions in institutional capital is built directly on these findings, which makes ecology a financial variable, not merely an ethical one.

Who is racing to mine the seabed, and how far have they actually got?

Two companies sit further ahead than anyone else, and both have real capital committed to a resource they cannot yet legally sell. Their progress is the clearest leading indicator you have for when, or whether, seabed mining becomes an operating reality.

The Metals Company (TMC)

TMC is a Canadian-listed firm holding CCZ exploration rights through sponsorship arrangements with Pacific island nations. It has argued publicly that nodule extraction produces less carbon dioxide and less solid waste per unit of metal than equivalent land-based mining.

Its commercial milestones have arrived in sequence:

1. On 4 August 2025, TMC released the S-K 1300 Prefeasibility Study for its NORI Area D contract, declaring the world’s first mineral reserves for a seafloor polymetallic nodule project.
2. On 11 August 2025, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a notice of full compliance on TMC’s US exploration applications under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act (DSHMRA), starting a certification stage expected to run roughly 100 days.
3. NORI was expected to file its exploitation application to the ISA around 27 June 2025.
4. Assuming permits are granted, TMC targets commercial production from NORI-D in Q4 2027, scaling to roughly 10.8 million tonnes per annum of wet nodules at steady state between 2031 and 2043.

TMC has been explicit that the Prefeasibility Study is not a feasibility study and does not support an immediate development decision. That caveat matters, and it is the company’s own.

What this dual-track approach tells you is that serious operators are not waiting passively for ISA consensus. By pursuing a US regulatory pathway in parallel, TMC has changed the timeline calculus for the entire sector.

DEME and Global Sea Mineral Resources

DEME, a Belgian marine engineering contractor, operates through its subsidiary Global Sea Mineral Resources. Its positioning is engineering-led rather than resource-led.

The company has developed specialised nodule collection equipment and completed offshore testing programmes. What it has not been able to do is move from pilot-scale to industrial operations, because that step requires ISA clearance that does not exist.

The structural irony ties both players together. Real equipment, real reserves, and real capital are all sitting idle behind a single regulatory gate that no one can currently open.

The supply chain stakes: cobalt, nickel, and what a regulatory green light would actually trigger

To understand why an ISA decision matters beyond the mining stocks themselves, start with where battery metals come from today.

Cobalt supply is dangerously concentrated. In 2025, total global supply was 295 kt (270 kt mined), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) held a 73% share, with Indonesia at 14%. Projections see the DRC easing to roughly 65% by 2030 as Indonesia scales toward 22%, but that is a slow shift that terrestrial diversification alone cannot accelerate on the timelines the energy transition demands.

Cobalt supply chain concentration in the DRC creates a structural vulnerability that battery manufacturers have been unable to engineer around, because alternative cathode chemistries such as LFP sacrifice energy density in applications where range remains the primary consumer requirement.

Nickel carries a different problem: quality. High-grade Class 1 nickel, the type strictly required for battery production, is far less abundant than the lower-grade nickel used in industrial applications. That creates a specific bottleneck in the EV cathode pipeline that raw tonnage does not solve.

This is why an ISA outcome functions as a binary catalyst. The two scenarios point in opposite directions.

The ESG constraint is why even a green light would not trigger an instant rush.

By 2026, at least 82 institutions with a combined EUR 24 trillion in assets had public policies excluding or heavily conditioning deep-sea mining investments.

That bloc built quickly. A July 2025 statement signed by 41 institutions representing over EUR 3.8 trillion said deep-sea mining must not proceed until risks are comprehensively understood, and the exclusion list has since expanded to include major banks. A 2024 financial analysis estimated the industry could destroy between USD 30-132 billion in corporate value and at least USD 465 billion in natural capital.

What this tells you is that a positive ISA ruling would not flood capital into seabed equities overnight. For anyone tracking cobalt and nickel as battery inputs, ISA council sessions have become binary events that reshape the valuation logic for the entire terrestrial supply chain, not just the seabed names.

Reading the ISA as a market signal: what to watch and when

You now have the full picture, so the practical question is how to interpret the next piece of regulatory news when it lands. Three specific triggers would move this from open-ended deadlock to binary catalyst.

1. Adoption of a final Mining Code: This would open the ISA permit pathway and validate every seabed business model at once, while introducing the oversupply risk to cobalt.
2. A formal moratorium resolution: This would preserve terrestrial market dynamics and remove seabed supply from the equation for years.
3. A DSHMRA commercial recovery permit for TMC: A US permit granted unilaterally would open production entirely outside ISA jurisdiction.

On current trajectory, the consensus path looks slow. The ISA’s open-ended, thematic work programme, with no deadline set as of the July 2025 session, suggests a Mining Code is unlikely before 2028 at the earliest. The growing moratorium coalition draws comparison to the trajectory of commercial whaling moratoria, which points toward a formal, time-bound pause rather than a swift approval.

Why the US permitting track changes the timeline

The most significant near-term signal may not come from the ISA at all. It may come from Washington.

TMC’s DSHMRA applications, with NOAA’s August 2025 full-compliance notice and a roughly 100-day certification stage, create the possibility of a US commercial permit issued ahead of any ISA resolution. That would produce a split regulatory reality, forcing every market participant to abandon the assumption that seabed mining is a single, globally gated event.

The US unilateral permitting approach under DSHMRA represents a strategic departure from multilateral consensus, one that other major economies with seabed interests are now being forced to price into their own regulatory positions regardless of their formal ISA stances.

Enforcement adds one more layer of uncertainty. ISA rules may not fully cover the ships, ports, and on-land processing sites that any operation depends on, leaving gaps in liability and oversight regardless of which permit is issued first.

The takeaway is that ISA council sessions are no longer procedural footnotes for this sector. They are the regulatory trigger points that determine whether deep-sea mining stays a stranded investment thesis or becomes an active factor in battery metal supply.

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with financial professionals before making investment decisions. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and financial projections are subject to market conditions and various risk factors. Forward-looking statements regarding permits, production timelines, and regulatory outcomes are speculative and subject to change based on market and regulatory developments.