More than 4 kilometers beneath the surface of the north Pacific Ocean lies what the tiny island of Nauru sees as a vast treasure chest — a seabed studded with minerals that could pioneer an economic transformation for remote nations around the region. For others, accessing the trove would trigger environmental disaster.

Even as Pacific island countries remain poles apart on the issue of deep-sea mining of metals that are crucial to the global energy transition away from fossil fuels, the clock is ticking.

With the backing of Nauru, which is a four-and-a-half-hour flight northeast from Brisbane with a population of 12,000, a relatively little known Canada-based firm called The Metals Company (TMC) is lining up an application for a commercial license to extract polymetallic nodules the size of large potatoes from the seabed in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) — a 4.5-million-square-kilometer expanse of the Pacific between Mexico and Hawaii — by end-June 2025.

While technological hurdles and financial commitments to make the project successful are significant, if approved this would be the first commercial license issued anywhere in the world for deep-sea mining, with countries from China to the U.S., Japan, India and Europe interested in following suit.

“We have our first production vessel, we have an arrangement in place where we’re going to process the nodules. Pending approval, we’re ready to go,” TMC chief executive Gerard Barron told Nikkei Asia in an interview on the sidelines of a Pacific leaders meeting in Tonga. The company aims to use a robot — as yet untested in commercial operations — that is designed to roam the seabed to “harvest” the nodules, firing jets of water at them to dislodge rocks from the bottom for collection.

The scale of the mineral riches at stake is gigantic: The U.N.-mandated International Seabed Authority (ISA), responsible for regulating activities beyond national waters, estimates nodules within the CCZ contain at least 5.95 billion tonnes of manganese, 270 million tonnes of nickel and 50 million tonnes of cobalt, all vital for clean energy sourcing. For comparison, the U.S. Geological Survey puts global land-based manganese reserves at 800 million tonnes, nickel at 90 million tonnes and cobalt at less than 10 million tonnes.

Advocates argue that seabed minerals are crucial for clean energy, with metals essential for batteries powering the global boom in electric vehicles and wind turbines. However, opposition is mounting: Some 32 countries have called for a pause on deep-sea mining projects citing concerns about irreversible harm to ocean ecosystems, according to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition nongovernmental organization, while nearly a thousand scientists earlier this year signed the Deep-Sea Mining Science Statement, a petition urging a halt.

If TMC — via its Nauru subsidiary — wins approval from the ISA, it could begin harvesting nodules by 2026 from the CCZ. The area is named after two tiny outcrops in the Pacific: Mexico’s Clarion Island, inhabited only by a small military garrison, and Clipperton Island, an uninhabited coral atoll that is France’s only territory in the northern Pacific.

The waters regulated by the ISA cover about 50% of the world’s oceans. It has already granted 31 exploration licenses across 22 contractors, sponsored by China, Russia, South Korea, India, the U.K., France, Poland, Brazil, Japan, Jamaica and Belgium.

Founded in 2011, Nasdaq-listed TMC is small compared with global mining giants like BHP and Rio Tinto, with a market value of about $310 million. Though its stock has fallen 16% so far this year, and has slumped 91% since it listed in June 2020, it has backers including Dutch offshore contractor Allseas Group and U.S. fund First Manhattan, and is rated a “buy” by Wedbush Securities.

CEO Barron says TMC has enough cash “to get through the next year.” He anticipates a “big valuation impact” when the application is lodged. It has loan facilities from Allseas and from Barron himself as well as a director’s family fund. In November, the company announced it would seek to raise $17.5 million with a share offer.

Now TMC’s wholly owned unit Nauru Ocean Resource Inc. (NORI) is preparing to submit a “plan of work” for its 70,000-sq.-km concession in the CCZ to the ISA. Although work to establish a formal ISA mining code is still in progress, Nauru in 2021 triggered a provision that gave the body two years to finish, after which time the ISA’s 36-member council, its decision-making organ, must accept — and can provisionally approve — commercial applications.

The lack of finalized regulations complicates the assessment process, said Aline Jaeckel, an associate professor at the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS). While the ISA has published a draft mining code, the final version may look “very different,” she said.

“Normally, once the mining regulations are adopted, they should say, ‘Here are our environmental goals and thresholds, and here is what you need to do when you are filing an application,'” she said.

“It’d be really difficult to assess whether this [TMC] application is good enough, because we have nothing to assess it against.”

Jaeckel said the council could potentially decide to postpone a decision on the application until rules are adopted, or seek an advisory opinion from the Seabed Disputes Chamber within the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, another U.N.-mandated organization.

The ISA’s decision-making council could also instruct the organ’s legal and technical commission, which assesses the application, to not make a recommendation on whether to proceed until the rules are adopted.

The broader issue of deep-sea mining is due to be tackled at a forthcoming special talanoa meeting hosted by the Pacific Oceans Commissioner. According to Pacific islands customs, talanoa talks allow for a forum where opposing views on an issue can be aired without the need to commit in advance to reaching a settled agreement. It’s not yet clear when the forum will take place.

Some officials, like Nauru President David Adeang, advocate accelerating mining to support renewable energy, while providing an opportunity for island nations to diversify their land-constrained economies.

“There is a risk of failing to seize the opportunity to transform to renewable energy and to decarbonize our planet,” Adeang told the U.N General Assembly in September. “The time to act is now.”

Nauru is one of the smallest countries in the world — covering around 21 sq. km, it is about the same size as New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport — but for a time in the mid-20th century, phosphate mining made it one of the richest per capita.

But the boom began drying up around the turn of the century, leaving its environment a wasteland and economy highly dependent on an Australian government refugee processing center, whose future is uncertain.

TMC’s exploration harvester robot was able to pick up around 86 tonnes per hour in tests, the company said. It’s now designing a larger commercial system able to harvest hundreds of tonnes per hour.

The company holds two additional contracts in the CCZ, one backed by Tonga and the other by Kiribati, which are both advocates for seabed mining.

Meanwhile, nearly 4,300 km southeast of Nauru lies the nation of the Cook Islands, which is among a group of countries such as Norway that are looking at harvesting nodules from the seabed in their own exclusive economic zones (EEZ) — and those areas aren’t subject to ISA approval.

Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown said his country, made up of 15 islands that are home to 15,000 people, was adopting a “precautionary approach” during its exploration phase, in an interview earlier this year.

“There are very strong environmental standards that must be met before any sort of extraction takes place, including understanding the deep-sea environment, the protection of biodiversity and what sort of technology will be used,” Brown said.

“We’re mindful of the countries that have a very strong stance on calling for a moratorium, but also mindful of those countries like ours that have a strong vested interest in the minerals sector.”

Still, several Pacific leaders firmly oppose moving ahead.

The Melanesian Spearhead Group — including leaders from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and an alliance of pro-independence groups from New Caledonia — last year put in place a moratorium on deep-sea mining within member countries’ territorial waters.

Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr., who also supports a moratorium, warned of “catastrophic” impacts on marine life and processes like carbon sequestration, where carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean.

“We understand the need for batteries, we understand the economic benefit but that’s where we went with fossil fuels and coal,” he told Nikkei Asia, speaking during the Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting in Japan earlier this year.

“We understand we needed it but it ended up being our destruction, and we don’t want to repeat this cycle again.”

What is still not understood is a great deal about the impact of seabed mining on underwater ecosystems, said marine ecologist Jesse van der Grient, who studied the potential impact of seabed mining in the Pacific while at the University of Hawaii and now works as a consultant..

There’s a wide array of understudied issues, said Van der Grient: from how light, noise and vibrations affect sea creatures, to the impact of habitat loss and the effect of sentiment plumes, both on the seafloor and higher up in the water where waste will be dispersed. Seasonal and longer-term variations in biomass also remain unclear, she said.

“All of these very basic things we just don’t even understand,” said Van der Grient. “Because of this whole rush — because it is, in a way, a rush — these kinds of studies, these analyses, are becoming very tricky to do in a very robust manner.”

New information continues to come to light. One study published this year by Nature brought deep-sea mining into the spotlight when it showed polymetallic nodules act as “geo batteries,” producing oxygen via electrolysis of seawater that helps support marine life.

While it partially funded the research, TMC has disputed the results robustly citing what it called selective data reporting that omitted key evidence, with CEO Barron calling the study “misleading.”

For marine ecologist Van Der Grient, the next step should be more studies to examine the “geo batteries” phenomenon.

“If it turns out these nodules are indeed a major oxygen source, then yes, it will have a real impact, but if they’re not contributing that much, then maybe not so much — but these questions we still don’t know,” she said.

“This is where we need a research program, which is going to take a few years, because science doesn’t work very quickly.”