The United States government has taken a significant step towards enabling commercial deep-sea mining in the Pacific Ocean, after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration formally certified an exploration licence application covering approximately 122,000 square kilometres of seafloor in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.

The application, submitted by TMC USA – the American subsidiary of The Metals Company (TMC) – relates to an area known as USA B, which the company estimates holds around 1.02 billion tonnes of polymetallic nodules. 

Those potato-sized mineral formations, which accumulate on the abyssal seafloor over millions of years, contain nickel, cobalt, manganese, and copper – metals that TMC argues are critical to energy infrastructure, defence manufacturing, and the green technology supply chain.

The certification does not grant a licence to mine. Rather, it marks the formal acceptance of the application into NOAA’s regulatory review process, triggering a sequence of steps that will include the publication of a Notice of Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement, followed by a draft EIS and draft Terms, Conditions and Restrictions open to public comment. 

A final determination on whether to issue the licence will follow.

“Today’s certification of our USA B exploration license application marks another important milestone in NOAA’s transparent, rules-based process and we look forward to the development and publication of an EIS,” said Gerard Barron, CEO and Chairman of The Metals Company. “Exploration is a critical step to unlocking the transformative potential of the untapped nodule resource for the United States.”

The USA B certification comes alongside a separate and more advanced application – the USA A consolidated application, which covers both an exploration licence and a commercial recovery permit. That application was submitted to NOAA in January 2026 and was determined to be fully compliant in late April.

Yet the regulatory momentum arrives at a moment of mounting scrutiny over whether TMC’s project is financially credible at all.

An independent analysis of the company’s own pre-feasibility study, commissioned by Deep Sea Mining Campaign, Greenpeace International, and Mining Watch Canada, has concluded that the project would fail to generate a meaningful profit even after accounting for capital and operating costs – and that it falls short of fundamental technical, financial, and regulatory expectations for a viable mining development.

The review, conducted by Dr Emmerman, a consultant specialising in evaluating the environmental impacts of mining, centres on a critical discrepancy in how TMC has constructed its financial case. By the company’s own admission in its pre-feasibility study, its confirmed mineral reserves would sustain just eight years of operation and generate zero profit. To reach a more favourable picture, TMC has incorporated an additional 113.1 million wet metric tonnes of speculative mineral resources – material that does not meet the standard threshold for economic viability – into its financial projections.

“According to the SEC, the economic analysis should be based upon mineral reserves alone – the only economically mineable part of mineral resources,” said Dr Emmerman. “By contrast, the economic analysis in The Metals Company pre-feasibility study is based upon 51 million wet metric tons of reserves plus an additional 113.1 million wet metric tons of resources.”

Even with those speculative resources included, the report finds the project does not hold up. The financial model, according to the analysis, rests on a collection of best-case assumptions: optimistic metal prices, exceptionally high recovery rates, no royalty provisions, and minimal allowances for cost escalation or closure liabilities. Nearly a third of projected revenue, the report finds, depends on manganese silicate markets and processing infrastructure that do not currently exist at commercial scale.

The report also highlights what it describes as a conspicuous absence of waste management provisions. TMC claims its operation would produce zero waste – a position that, the analysis notes, effectively excludes from consideration the sediment-laden water discharged back into the ocean as mining disturbs the seafloor. The radioactivity of polymetallic nodules, which intensifies when they are broken or crushed during processing, receives no acknowledgement in the company’s study either. The report further notes that the pre-feasibility study was largely prepared by TMC’s own employees rather than independent experts – a departure from standard practice designed to prevent self-serving assumptions.

“Even with all these best-case assumptions, they’re still not going to be profitable,” said Andy Whitmore, Finance Advocacy Officer of the Deep Sea Mining Campaign. “Dr Emmerman’s report is saying that loud and clear.”

Whitmore also addressed the company’s tendency to challenge the motives of its critics rather than engage with their substance. “The Metals Company tends to be dismissive of the people who write critical reports and their motives,” he said. “Don’t do an ad hominem defence. Go into the substance and defend it. As far as I’m aware, we haven’t really seen defence of it.”

Oceanographic contacted The Metals Company for a response to the independent report’s findings. The company had not provided a comment at the time of publication.

TMC has positioned itself as the most scientifically prepared entrant in the emerging deep-sea mining sector, pointing to more than a decade of environmental data collection and offshore engineering in the CCZ. The company states that 37 peer-reviewed studies have been published by independent academics based on its dataset to date, and anticipates that exploratory activities under the USA B licence, if granted, would generate the basis for hundreds more.

The regulatory progress also arrives against a broader backdrop of international deadlock. The latest session of the International Seabed Authority Council — the body tasked with governing deep-sea mining in international waters — concluded recently without approving any mining activity or establishing a mining code, leaving the global governance framework for the industry unresolved.

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