- Norway’s plans to mine seabed minerals in Arctic waters remain in limbo after the first licensing round was delayed in December 2024. However, the government maintains that progress will resume soon, with a licensing round tentatively set for 2026.
- Some deep-sea mining companies have faced significant financial struggles due to the delay, with one company going bankrupt and another slashing costs; yet, other firms remain optimistic, insisting the industry’s future is still secure.
- Experts warn that considerable knowledge gaps must be addressed before deep-sea mining can proceed, particularly regarding environmental impacts.
- In Norway, the industry also continues to face heavy opposition from environmental groups, the fishing sector, and several political parties.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network, where Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a fellow.
BERGEN, Norway — It’s been nearly five months since the Norwegian government paused its controversial plans to launch deep-sea mining in Arctic waters. This proposed industry aims to generate supplies of critical minerals, but critics say the cost to the marine environment could be devastating. Some Norwegian deep-sea mining companies have faced significant financial struggles due to the delay, with one going bankrupt and another slashing costs. Yet other firms, and the government itself, remain optimistic, insisting the industry’s future is still secure.
Anette Broch, the young CEO of the Bergen-based deep-sea mining startup Adepth Minerals, is in the latter camp. She told Mongabay the delay isn’t ideal, but that she’s not overly concerned.
“I’m not worried about the future of deep-sea mining,” Broch said during an interview at Bergen University’s natural history museum. “This is a lengthy process, but I believe our government will initiate the process.”
Broch, whose friendly demeanor makes her one of the more approachable figures in the Norwegian deep-sea mining industry, said Adepth will use the time leading up to the licensing round, tentatively planned for 2026, to focus on data analysis and the development of new seabed mining technologies. She said the company is also using this time to raise public awareness about its work, which she says is gaining broader support due to global events such as the Russian war in Ukraine and a growing recognition that deep-sea mining may offer a more sustainable alternative to land-based mining. “Some people paint us as reckless,” Broch said in reference to wording used in a recent Greenpeace Norway press release. “But I wouldn’t be involved in this if it were a reckless industry.”
Yet critics remain unconvinced. At this year’s Deep Sea Minerals conference — an annual event organized by Norwegian geoscience organization GeoPublishing in Bergen, and that took place April 1-3 — Greenpeace Norway staged two protests, including one that temporarily shut down the event on the second day.
In an interview with Mongabay, Haldis Helle of Greenpeace Norway, a steely-eyed activist with an encyclopedic knowledge of the deep-sea mining sector, likened the industry to “gambling” with the ocean. Her words were on message: On the first day of the conference, Greenpeace had transformed the venue’s normally austere entrance into a balloon-festooned casino for conference attendees to walk through, to drive home the point that deep-sea mining would be gambling with the planet’s future.
“We’re talking about sending mining machines into the last true wilderness on Earth, and it’s completely reckless,” Helle said, using the very word Broch had taken issue with. “Deep-sea mining is really unnecessary.”
Environmentalists have been particularly outspoken against the industry, warning that deep-sea mining could irreparably destroy fragile marine ecosystems, many of which remain unexplored. Some fishers, including the membership of Norges Fiskarlag, the largest fishing association in Norway, with more than 4,000 members, have also spoken out against the industry. They argue that deep-sea mining might destroy the marine environment and severely disrupt the nation’s sustainable and profitable fishing industry.
“We have no trust in this,” Jan Henrik Sandberg, a senior adviser at Norges Fiskarlag, told Mongabay over a video call. “We have asked the government to withdraw the process of granting areas for the development of marine mining, but I’m not sure if they will listen to us.”
The industry has also drawn criticism from trade unions, some members of the scientific community, and even the general public. A recent poll commissioned by Greenpeace Norway found that only 18% of civilians in Norway support deep-sea mining. Then there are several political parties in the country that oppose deep-sea mining, with some actively working to halt the industry’s development.
On one hand, this mounting opposition seems to suggest that deep-sea mining has no future in Norway. On the other hand, there are signs that the industry is nonetheless inching forward, and the prospect of commercial mining commencing in Norway remains a strong possibility. Norway is one of just a handful of countries looking to mine the deep waters within their jurisdiction, and despite the delay, the Scandinavian nation may yet become the first to begin this kind of seabed mining.
Is the industry ‘moving forward’?
In June 2023, the Norwegian government released a report indicating it planned to open a 281,000-square-kilometer (108,500-square-mile) section of its continental shelf, an area roughly the size of New Zealand, to seabed mining. The proposed area lies within the nation’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and its extended continental shelf. While the Norwegian government pledged to take a precautionary approach to deep-sea mining, the plans drew sharp criticism from experts, who argued that the government was moving ahead too quickly to properly assess the potential impacts of mining on the marine environment, especially since some of the proposed mining areas overlap with vulnerable marine ecosystems. Furthermore, many observers contend that Norway’s plans to mine the seabed stand in stark contrast to its ambitions of championing a sustainable ocean economy.
Despite the pushback, in January 2024, Norway’s parliament voted to allow the deep-sea mining industry to go forward, starting with an exploration phase, although the licenses it would grant would technically be exploitation licenses. By June that year, the government had proposed 386 license areas in the Norwegian Sea for potential mining activity, and invited feedback from the public during a consultation process.
But momentum stalled in December when the Socialist Left Party, a small but influential political party in Norway, agreed to support the national budget if the licensing round was stopped, which ground the process to a halt.
Still, Norwegian government officials insist the industry is on track. Lars Erik Aamot, director general at Norway’s Ministry of Energy, the government body that would oversee any future licensing process, told Mongabay things are still “moving forward.”
“The first licensing round is planned for 2026, and then we will award licenses, probably during 2026 or 2027,” Aamot said in a hallway interview at the Deep Sea Minerals Conference. “Then companies would get a work program that will take a few years,” he added, in reference to the exploration phase of seabed mining, “and [depending] on the result in that phase, that will decide what’s next … for exploitation.”
Hilde Ottesen Braut, the head of new industries at the Norwegian Offshore Directorate, an agency tasked by the Ministry of Energy with mapping mineral deposits along the Norwegian continental shelf, told Mongabay at the conference that the government has also increased funding for resource and environmental mapping of seabed minerals — from 30 million kroner ($2.9 million) in previous years to 150 million kroner ($14.3 million) in 2025. This increase was initially announced in October 2024, before the licensing round was delayed.
“That’s to show that they want [deep-sea mining] to move forward,” Braut said in reference to the increased funding, “and they want us to move forward.”
Despite the Norwegian government’s claims of progress, political pressure might make it difficult for the industry to advance in the future. Lars Haltbrekken, a member of the Norwegian parliament for the Socialist Left Party who serves as its environmental spokesperson, said his party would try to delay the licensing round again.
“We will try to repeat the success we had by stopping the handout of permits for looking for deep-sea minerals,” Haltbrekken told Mongabay over the phone.
Norway is also heading into a parliamentary election in September, adding a layer of political uncertainty. Yet Haltbrekken said he still believes a delay in the licensing round can be implemented.
“If there is a shift in government and the conservatives take over, I believe that the Liberal Party — which is also an environmental party in Norway — will try to do the same job as we did and stop it.”
Mixed signals in the deep-sea mining sector
While the uncertainty in the deep-sea mining industry doesn’t seem to be affecting Adepth, it is affecting other companies in the sector in Norway. Loke Marine Minerals, a startup with ambitions to mine both off Norway’s coast and also in the international waters of the Pacific Ocean, declared bankruptcy on April 3, the final day of the Deep Sea Minerals conference. The announcement followed weeks of instability for the company. In March, Loke announced that it had cut its workforce in half, from six employees to three. Walter Sognnes, Loke’s CEO, declined Mongabay’s request for an interview following the announcement of his company’s bankruptcy.
Green Minerals, the only Norwegian deep-sea mining company that is publicly traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange, is also facing financial hardship. Øivind Dahl-Stamnes, one of the company’s founders, recently stepped in as CEO after Ståle Monstad stepped down in December 2024. According to Green Minerals’ most recent annual report, the company slashed 80% of its budget.
“We basically had to cut costs,” Dahl-Stamnes told Mongabay at the conference in Bergen, although he stressed that the company had retained competency. “Political uncertainty is not something that we as a company like, and investors don’t like it,” he said.
Dahl-Stamnes said the government’s decision to delay the licensing round came as a “big surprise,” but that he remains cautiously optimistic, noting that Norway’s current prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, had described the pause as a “delay” and not a “stop.” Dahl-Stamnes also emphasized his company’s readiness if the government does greenlight the industry: “If the government were opening up tomorrow, we will be ready tomorrow.”
In another notable shift, Espen Simonstad, formerly a senior adviser at Green Minerals, has taken a new position at the Norwegian Environment Agency. The government body has previously called out the Norwegian government for not prioritizing the environment in its seabed mining plans, and for not having a clear stopping point between the proposed exploration and exploitation stages. Ann Mari Vik Green, the agency’s technical coordinator, told Mongabay in an email that the agency was now working to publicly respond to the government’s proposal for new regulations on data collection and documentation in deep-sea mining activities along Norway’s continental shelf, which opened for public consultation in February. However, Green stressed that Simonstad would not be involved in the agency’s work on seabed minerals.
Aker BP, a prominent Norwegian oil and gas company, has also previously floated the idea of entering the deep-sea mining game. Yet Ole-Johan Faret, a spokesperson for the company, told Mongabay in an email that Aker BP would only pursue seabed mineral extraction if it was proven to be both “environmentally and economically viable.”
‘It takes time to collect the knowledge’
In a small, light-filled office at the University of Bergen, benthic ecologist Pedro Ribeiro retrieved a small plastic bag from the shelf behind his desk, and removed a paper-wrapped object. He opened it up to reveal a jagged, gray-brown rock.
“This could be radioactive,” he told Mongabay, holding up the rock. “I’m not joking.” However, he said any radioactivity in the rock was very low, which allowed him to safely handle it.
Ribeiro said the rock came from the chimney-like opening of a hydrothermal vent that gushes metal-rich fluid, leading to a buildup of minerals around the vent. Deep-sea miners are interested in the exact kind of deposit Ribeiro held in his hand, known in the geological world as a seafloor massive sulfide (SMS) deposit. They’re also looking to target the manganese crusts that form on the sides and peaks of seamounts.
Yet Ribeiro is less interested in these mineral deposits than in the creatures that live on and around hydrothermal vents and seamounts. For the past 15 years, Ribeiro has been studying abyssal life ranging from quill worms to cold-water corals and Arctic sponges, as deputy director of the University of Bergen’s Centre for Deep-Sea Research and a scientist on many deep-sea projects, including EMINENT, an initiative of Adepth Minerals. His research extends beyond Norway to areas like the Azores and the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the mineral rich stretch of international waters in the Pacific Ocean that’s the focus of deep-sea mining interests.
Leaning toward his desktop computer, Ribeiro played a series of videos showing a transect survey of the Boyd Seamount, located above the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian Sea, within the government’s proposed deep-sea mining area. After landing in the sediment about 2,500 meters (roughly 8,200 feet) below the surface, the camera begins moving vertically up along the seamount. Ribeiro pointed to squiggles, blobs and gelatinous shapes, which he identified as feather stars, anemones and carnivorous sea sponges. For now, Ribeiro and his team are working to visually identify all of these creatures, but he said they’re gradually transitioning into machine-learning methods to automatically identify fauna.
“The Arctic mid-ocean ridge area is still poorly studied,” Ribeiro said. “We don’t have a very good assessment of [biodiversity in] areas such as the sediment areas or even for the most charismatic habitats including hydrothermal vents and seamounts. There are many new species potentially new to science that we are still identifying and haven’t even named yet.”
In addition to gaps in knowledge about biodiversity and community structure, Ribeiro said there’s still much to learn about the connectivity between seamounts and between hydrothermal vents in the Arctic — in other words, how different areas in this region are linked biologically, ecologically and genetically. Understanding these connections, he said, is key to predicting how deep-sea ecosystems might recover from seabed mining. He added there’s also limited understanding about how sediment plumes from mining activities might spread and settle in Norway’s proposed mining areas, and how these plumes could impact the marine environment.
Pål Buhl-Mortensen of Norway’s Institute of Marine Research shared the view that extensive knowledge gaps remain to be filled before experts can properly assess the impacts of the potential deep-sea mining industry.
Buhl-Mortensen leads a government-funded initiative called MAREANO that maps Norway’s seabed and supplies critical data for everything from sustainable marine resource management to biodiversity research. Although MAREANO is one of the world’s most extensive seabed mapping programs, much remains to be done. So far, it has fully mapped only about 10% of Norway’s seabed.
“What is really the situation is that it takes time to collect the knowledge needed,” Buhl-Mortensen told Mongabay during a visit to his workplace. “There are species we don’t know out there … species that need taxonomic revision and better understanding of their taxonomic position, but also the composition of species, how they group into communities, how they relate to the environment.”
Will Norway greenlight deep-sea mining?
With the licensing round not definitively scheduled, only proposed for sometime in 2026, companies appear to be weighing their options. Broch of Adepth Minerals said if the licensing round is delayed again, her company might “reevaluate” its strategy and even shift its focus beyond Norway to international waters.
“We are open to where the good opportunities are,” Broch said.
Other companies are also casting their gaze farther afield. Green Minerals, for instance, announced in January 2023 that it had signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at securing a mining license in international waters. However, the company did not disclose any further details about this agreement to Mongabay.
Loke Marine Minerals had already staked a claim in the international arena. The company acquired two deep-sea mining licenses in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone through its purchase of UK Seabed Resources (UKSR) from U.S. aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin. Those licenses were granted by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the United Nations-affiliated body responsible for regulating deep-sea mining beyond national jurisdictions. Reporting from the Financial Times indicates that these licenses, which are sponsored by the U.K., are now up for auction following Loke’s bankruptcy, and that the U.K. may launch a national security review and recommend restructuring UKSR under a British holding company.
Yet progress on deep-sea mining in international waters has been even slower than in Norway. The ISA has not yet come up with the regulatory framework for commercial operations, despite working on it for more than a decade. This drawn-out pace has frustrated many in the industry. Among them is Sognnes of the now-bankrupt Loke, who in January co-signed a letter to the ISA Council’s then-president, Norwegian diplomat Olav Myklebust, criticizing the delays and saying they placed an “unfair burden on contractors” that had made substantial investments in the industry with no guarantee the industry would go forward.
Gerard Barron, CEO of Canadian startup The Metals Company (TMC), also signed the letter — but his company recently took matters into its own hands. In March, TMC announced a controversial plan to obtain mining approval from the U.S., rather than the ISA, thereby circumnavigating the need for international approval. At the Deep Sea Minerals conference in Bergen, TMC’s tactic generated a great deal of discussion, and in some cases criticism, from both industry and academic attendees. However, no one was willing to speak on the record about this issue.
Environmentalists have publicly slammed TMC’s move, with Andy Whitmore of the Deep Sea Mining Campaign calling it a “red flag” indicating that the company is desperately trying to stay afloat financially. “This is a company floundering under pressure and trying to buy time,” Whitmore said in a statement.
Helle of Greenpeace Norway said she sees this same desperation playing out in her home country. “In Norway, Loke Marine Minerals has just filed for bankruptcy, while the other mining companies have begged Norwegian taxpayers to pay for their exploration, and asked to be exempt from Norwegian labor law,” she said.
“This is clearly not an industry growing,” she added. “They are desperate, and it shows that deep-sea mining is not a good investment, neither for the planet, nor for investors.”
Banner image: A squat lobster in the deep sea. Image by Schmidt Ocean Institute (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff writer for Mongabay and a fellow with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network. Follow her work on Bluesky: @elizabethalberts.bsky.social.
Norway poised to sail past opposition with deep-sea mining licensing plans
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