We all know Trump has never been one to tiptoe around controversy. He’s all in on Big Oil, he’s made “drill, baby, drill” a policy centerpiece, and now… he’s bypassing the United Nations to drill for something else entirely: deep-sea minerals.
Late Thursday night, while likely toggling between his crypto portfolio and firing off all-caps missives on Truth Social, Trump signed an executive order that throws open the ocean floor to American mining companies. Not just in U.S. waters, but in international waters too. And he’s doing it without waiting on a green light from the International Seabed Authority… the little-known U.N. body based in Kingston, Jamaica that’s spent the last decade drafting a global rulebook for how, when, and if countries can mine the ocean floor.
The logic behind the move is clear: beat China to the minerals. The executive order frames it as a matter of national security and economic competitiveness. And honestly, he’s not wrong about the stakes. China currently refines around 90% of the world’s cobalt and has an iron grip on rare earth processing. So Trump’s take? If we can’t out-refine them, we’ll just dig deeper.
What’s buried down there is no joke… cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese, and rare earth elements. The raw ingredients for EV batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, missile systems, and, yes, even that overpriced iPhone you cracked last week. Plenty of countries know the value of these resources, but the U.S. is now first to fast-track access.
And leading the charge is The Metals Company, a Canadian firm that’s been waiting for a moment like this since before anyone cared about battery minerals. Based in Vancouver but legally armed through its U.S. subsidiary, TMC has its eyes on the Clarion-Clipperton Zone… a 4.5 million square kilometer stretch of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico. It’s absolutely littered with potato-sized polymetallic nodules, which are dense lumps of pure mineral wealth.
What’s pretty crazy is that TMC’s shortcut is an old Reagan-era law… the Deep Sea Hard Mineral Resources Act of 1980. Written long before anyone thought seabed mining would be real, it now gives TMC legal cover to start mining international waters with U.S. backing. Add in Trump’s executive order, and they’re basically cleared for launch.
CEO Gerard Barron has already briefed Congress and aims to start mining by year-end. His pitch is that the abyssal zone (3,000 to 6,000 meters down) is practically lifeless. No plants. Minimal biomass. He argues it’s far less destructive than tearing up rainforests to extract the same metals (I’m sure Greta Thunberg disagrees).
Environmentalists, unsurprisingly, don’t agree. Greenpeace called the move “a slap in the face” to international cooperation. The Ocean Conservancy said it could “unleash irreversible damage” on fragile ecosystems.
And it’s far more than just treehuggers raising alarms. More than 40 countries (including China, the U.K., India, and Norway) have voiced concerns. Their worry is that the U.S. is jumping the gun while the ISA is still finalizing the global playbook.
Scientists are especially nervous. Those polymetallic nodules take forever to form. Once scraped off the seabed, they’re gone for good. And while microbes might recover over time, larger species (many of which we haven’t even discovered yet) may not.
Still, the Trump administration is all in. They estimate $300 billion in added GDP and 100,000 new jobs over the next decade. Whether or not those numbers hold water (pun intended), I guess we’ll see.
PS: The headlines are full of panic… inflation’s too high, the Fed’s asleep at the wheel, and Trump never fails to kill any market momentum with more tariffs. On the surface, it looks like the market’s barely breathing.
But underneath all that noise?
We’re seeing some of the fastest stock moves in years… especially in the small-cap space, where low float and high tension can trigger a 100% pop before lunch. Some are up 200% in under 24 hours… and nobody on CNBC is talking about them.
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Stock.News does not have positions in companies mentioned.
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