San Juan, Puerto Rico – An abrupt advertisement shook the members of a little -known UN agency based in Jamaica that has protected deep international waters for more than 30 years.
The metal company in Vancouver, Canada, said Thursday night that he is looking for permission from the United States government to begin deep water mining In international waters, potentially avoiding the international authority of marine beds, which has the power to authorize exploitation permits but has not done so.
“It would be a great violation of international law … If the United States granted it,” said Duncan Currie, International and Environmental Lawyer and Legal Advisor of the Deep Conservation Coalition, an alliance of environmental groups based in the Netherlands.
The metal company seeks marine minerals such as cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese used in electric car batteries and other green technologies.
The announcement was made only a few hours before the Council of 36 members of the International Fund Authority was met in Jamaica on Friday, the last day of a two -week conference focused on how and if allowing deep water mining, A one year debate.
The authority was scheduled to speak on Friday about the company’s commercial mining application.
“The scale of the threat … It has taken incredibly seriously here,” said Louisa Casson, a Greenpeace activist who attended Friday’s meeting. “There are questions and a lack of clarity of what they really plan to do.”
She said that a question is whether the company plans to request a permit anyway to the authority, even while the conversations with the United States government continues.
Currie said that the time of the announcement of the metal company was “insulting to the ISA.”
“It is an extremely irresponsible threat. Basically it has a weapon to the international community,” he said.
The international marine authority was created in 1994 by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is ratified by more than 165 nations, but not by the United States.
The Metal Company argued that the United States Mining Code of the United States would allow it to begin operations in international waters, since it is not a member of the authority and, therefore, is not bound by its rules.
The company said it was already in conversations with the Oceanic and Atmospheric National Administration of the United States, among others.
“We have met with numerous officials in the White House, as well as in the United States Congress regarding its support for this industry,” said the company in a statement.
NOAA did not immediately respond to a comment request.
The metal company criticized what said it was “slow progress” by the international authority of seabed in a proposed mining code that has not yet been completed.
The authority has issued more than 30 exploration licenses, but there are no provisional licenses.
Most of the current exploration is occurring in the Clarion-Clipperton fracture area, which covers 1.7 million square miles (4.5 million square kilometers) between Hawaii and Mexico. It is happening at depths ranging from 13,000 to 19,000 feet (4,000 to 6,000 meters).
More than 30 countries, including Canada, have requested a prohibition, pause or moratorium on deep water mining, and companies such as Volvo, BMW, Volkswagen, Google and Samsung have committed themselves not to use sea minerals.
“The international seabed is the common heritage of humanity, and no state should take unilateral measures to exploit it,” Greenpeace said in a statement.
Scientists have warned That the minerals in the intestines of the ocean take millions of years to form, and that mining could unleash noise, light and storms of suffocating dust.
“The deep ocean is one of the last truly wild places on Earth, the home of life that we only begin to understand. Letting deep water mining progress would now be like starting a fire in a book library that no one has yet read,” said Emily Jeffers, senior lawyer of the Biological Diversity Center.
However, companies have argued that deep water mining is cheaper and has less impact than earth mining.
