The robot about to be let loose on the Norwegian seabed looks like a giant tripod, kicking up sand as it drills to collect samples from one of the last untouched places on Earth.
This eerie contraption belongs to Loke Marine Minerals, expected to be among the first companies to embark on an exploration process that lays the groundwork for deep-sea mining in the Arctic. In a world-first, Norway’s parliament voted on Tuesday to allow a new generation of mining companies to search a large area of Norwegian waters—the size of Italy—for the minerals needed to build electric cars, mobile phones, and solar panels.
Walter Sognnes, CEO of Loke, considers the vote not just a license for exploration but also a foot in the door for extracting these minerals. “If you find the resources, and if you have the technology that shows that you can develop this with acceptable [environmental] impact, then you will have your green light,” he says of the process. If his company receives a license to harvest minerals, Sognnes plans to mine the seabed’s manganese crust, which, he claims, is rich in cobalt and rare earth minerals.
This is controversial new territory, with researchers saying they do not know enough about the deep sea to predict how these companies’ activities will affect underwater ecosystems. Norway’s government-funded Institute of Marine Research has recommended another five to 10 years of research. “We have an idea about what sort of organisms are down there,” says Steffen Leth Jørgensen, director of the deep sea center at Norway’s University of Bergen, explaining that he is concerned about the corals and sponge grounds. “We don’t know how they will respond to mining.” Activists, who protested outside Norway’s parliament building on Tuesday, have described the prospect of deep-sea mining as a disaster that will pose a grave threat to marine life.
The three companies expected to apply for licenses to start exploration in Norway are all startups launched since 2019. Although they are all backed by more established “sea services” companies—Norwegian defense contractor Kongsberg Gruppen and Norwegian shipping group Wilhelmsen both hold stakes in Loke—the startups have no established reputation to lose.
Tuesday’s vote arrived at a moment when many larger companies seemed to be cutting ties with deep-sea mining. In May last year, Danish shipping giant Maersk announced it was selling its stake in The Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian company with ambitions to start deep-sea mining in international waters off the island of Nauru, near Australia. In March, US defense company Lockheed Martin also unloaded its deep-sea mining subsidiary, UK Seabed Resources (UKSR), to Loke for an undisclosed sum.
The divestments have been linked to mounting controversy around deep-sea mining and the damage activists say the new industry risks causing to underwater life. BMW is one company that has already pledged not to use raw materials from deep-sea mining in its cars. In October, the UK joined Canada and New Zealand in calling for a pause on deep-sea mining until the environmental impacts of this new industry could be better understood. Those concerns are already making it difficult to find investment and strike deals with technology partners, Sognnes claims.