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Deadline for US lawmakers to submit questions on deep sea mining at 5pm EDT

Keriann Lee

• 2 min read
Architect of the Capitol
Credit: Architect of the Capitol

Today is the deadline for US lawmakers to submit final questions on deep sea mining, following this week's congressional hearing on the matter.

The hearing, held on Capitol Hill, involved contributions from the CEOs of two commercial miners, The Metals Company and Impossible Metals, as well as a legal advisor from an international conservationist group, Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, and a Massachusetts's Institute of Technology deep sea researcher.

You can read our stories on what they said here and here.

Lawmakers must submit any follow ups by 5pm EDT this afternoon, after which the guests must submit their responses within ten days in order to make it into the congressional record.

At least two Democrat Representatives, Maxine Dexter of Oregon and Jared Huffman of California were critical of deep sea mining in the Republican controlled committee, which backs the US president's executive order to bypass the international regulator and issue licences.

Mr. Huffman's state has already banned deep-sea mining in its state waters through the Seabed Mining Prevention Act, which was signed into law in 2022 whilst Oregon enacted a moratorium as far back as 1991.

Along with Washington, which also enacted a moratorium in 2021, these contiguous US states all have large coast lines on the Pacific, the ocean of interest to deep sea miners.

Executive orders, whilst issued by the federal government, cannot supersede state laws.

The hearing on Tuesday was conducted by the Oversight and Investigations sub-committee of the Republican House Committee on Natural Resources, which issued a pro-deep sea mining memo in advance of the meeting.

The memo supported the president's executive order allowing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to issue licences for deep sea mining bypassing the international regulator.

The memo, which outlined the issues clearly for members, argued that the minerals in question at the bottom of the Pacific outside of any country's jurisdiction as well as within American waters are critical to the country's national security, economy,  energy infrastructure, and are essential to contemporary life.

It argued that:

In addition, the Committee continues to speak to the rapidly increasing difficulty of meeting mineral demand due to permitting delays, legislative restrictions, and America’s near-total mineral dependence on foreign nations like China
Spurred by this battered current state of domestic mineral supply chains, Republican Members of Congress  and the Trump Administration have championed an all-of-the-above approach to mineral exploration and extraction policy, which includes not only streamlining permitting for terrestrial mining projects and encouraging American companies to continue investing in space mining technologies, but also diving deep to harvest minerals lining the sea floor.