MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Norway votes to allow deep-sea mining to ensure a “green transition”

“We need more aid – and fast. In recent days, the Royal Navy made its first maritime shipment of aid into Egypt”

With crossings opened for longer, water supplies restored and UN staff able to safely distribute food, we can limit the scale of this catastrophe. This article was originally published in The Guardian and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.The Parliament of Norway has voted to allow deep-sea mining to go forward in the Norwegian Sea, in an area nearly the size of Italy, and despite warnings from scientists and conservationists of its impact on the marine environment.

 

The nature news site Mongabay said the Norwegian government previously proposed opening a 329,000-square-kilometer portion of the Norwegian Sea to deep-sea mining. In December 2023 Norway’s minority government negotiated a deal with opposition parties to open up the ocean off Norway’s coast to deep-sea mining.

However the original proposal was later reduced to 281,000 km2. Most of this region falls across Norway’s extended continental shelf, which is technically in international waters, but over which Norway has jurisdiction.

Another portion falls within the territorial waters of the Svalbard archipelago, which Norway claims as its own exclusive economic zone, although this is contested by nations such as Russia, Iceland, the U.K. and several EU countries.

Experts say they believe the next step could be the Norwegian Offshore Directorate, the government agency responsible for regulating petroleum resources, inviting companies to bid for exploration licenses, which could happen as early as this year. However, there’s currently no public timeline of forthcoming events.

Norway intends to mine for minerals such as magnesium, cobalt, copper, nickel and rare-earth metals found in manganese crusts on seamounts and sulfide deposits on active, inactive or extinct hydrothermal vents. The government says seabed mining is necessary to ensure that Norway is able to succeed in a “green transition.”

“We need to cut 55% of our emissions by 2030, and we also need to cut the rest of our emissions after 2030,” Astrid Bergmål, Norway’s state secretary for the energy minister, said. “So, the reason for us to look into seabed minerals is the large amount of critical minerals that will be needed for many years.”

Critics, however, say that minerals for renewable energy technologies could be obtained from land-based sources and recycling processes. But Bergmål said deep-sea mining will be done in a “step-by-step approach” and that it will only be permitted to go forward if the Norwegian government can ensure it will be done in a “sustainable way and with acceptable consequences.”

“If there is one country that can do this in a stepwise manner … that is Norway,” Bergmål said, “because when we say that we are going to put the world’s highest standards with respect to environmental concerns, we do it in practice.”

Norway isn’t the only country with ambitions to mine the deep sea. Other nations, including the Cook Islands, China and Japan, are working on similar plans within their own jurisdictions.