The U.S. is in jeopardy of being left at the starting gate because it has not ratified the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, a requirement to be a member of the ISA.

“There’s certainly a risk in getting left behind in the negotiations,” said Andrew Friedman, an associate manager at Pew Charitable Trusts focused on seabed mining. “The U.S. runs the risk of not being able to influence the trajectory of these negotiations.”

The talks come at a time when the International Energy Agency is projecting that demand for minerals like those underneath the seafloor will rise exponentially by 2040, driven by products like electric vehicles and battery storage for renewable energy. And the Biden administration is facing challenges opening new mines on land as states and local communities put up barriers.

There’s a sense of urgency to the negotiations because Nauru, a Pacific island nation, triggered a deadline last year that requires the ISA to complete regulations by July 2023 or allow miners to operate under whatever rules are in place at that time.

The U.S. will not only be unable to vote on the regulations, it will also forfeit its ability to sponsor companies to compete for contracts in international waters since all contractors need a sponsoring state within the ISA.

It’s not just the minerals and investment capital the U.S. might miss out on. Supply chain implications are also of critical interest, said Duncan Wood, a vice president at the Wilson Center, since battery manufacturing is a field currently dominated by China.

“The U.S. needs to focus on domestic production and working in friendly countries to boost and secure supply of critical minerals,” Wood said. “Think about a conflict with China over Taiwan, where we stop buying semiconductors and stop buying rare earth elements from China. That will be a disaster. This is now blatantly a matter of national security.”

The State Department declined to comment.

The U.S. has resisted embracing the Law of the Sea convention since 1982, when then-President Ronald Reagan cited its restrictions on seabed mining as his reason for not signing. Since then, repeated attempts to ratify the document have failed to make it to a full vote in the Senate.

Top priorities at the ISA meetings will include issues such as assessing the impacts on the marine environment and determining a fair royalty system for companies or countries doing the mining.

The ISA has already been issuing “exploration contracts” in which state-backed enterprises and private companies have exclusive rights to explore for a certain mineral and study the marine environment, but no commercial extraction has occurred. Of the 31 exploration contracts issued, 19 are located in an area off the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico that is rich in rare earth elements and other minerals.

The U.S. has not sponsored any such exploration contracts, but there is domestic interest. Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest defense contractor, is involved in two British projects. China has sponsored five contracts, and Russia, South Korea, India, Germany, France and Japan are also involved.

But environmentalists and other seabed mining skeptics say there just isn’t enough scientific knowledge as to how dredging the seafloor and extracting minerals could stir sediment in the ocean and affect ecosystems. Friedman says the ISA lacks the capacity to properly monitor mining expeditions for environmental impact: The current draft regulations say any mining contract would need to cover a minimum area of 620 square miles to upward of 46,000 square miles, depending on the mined mineral.

ISA Secretary-General Michael Lodge acknowledged the enforcement concerns, writing last year that the organization has “neither ocean-going vessels nor deep-sea submersibles at its disposal” and that the ISA will need to “significantly upscale its regulatory capacity.”

Matt Gianni, a co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, questions whether the demand justifies the environmental cost. He points to a 2016 study from Australia’s University of Technology Sydney that shows the projected increase in minerals demand “does not require deep-sea mining activity.” And a 2020 report from the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy said scientific understanding of deep-sea ecosystems is “still in its infancy,” the impacts of seabed mining on marine life are “likely immense” and seabed mining conflicts with U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

But mining companies smell opportunity — and profits. “Everybody I know wants a rulebook” from the ISA, said Samantha Smith, the head of sustainability at Global Sea Minerals Resources, a Belgian subsidiary that holds an exploration contract.

“We cannot get the metals we need for population growth, urbanization and clean energy without extracting minerals and you cannot extract minerals without any impact whatsoever,” Smith said. “An assessment of all the options at the surface is necessary and why going to the seafloor might make sense. You’re not removing people or trees, and there’s an opportunity to produce less waste and less CO2. That also doesn’t mean it should be a free-for-all.”

Saleem Ali, an energy and environment professor at the University of Delaware who studies extractive industries, said last year during a debate on seabed mining that climate change presents “very tough choices” with “suboptimal solutions.”

“We will end up having to make some trade-offs. We do that on a daily basis,” Ali said. “If deep sea mining is to happen, there must be offsetting with reference to terrestrial mining. The only cogent case to be made is that there needs to be some reduction on terrestrial mining.”

The issue is already creating a wedge. Google, BMW, Samsung SDI, AB Volvo Group and other companies have signed onto a World Wild Fund For Nature moratorium committing to not source any materials from the seabed. More than 600 marine scientists and policy experts worldwide signed onto a similar statement. And the European Parliament, along with Pacific nations like Fiji and Papua New Guinea, also support the moratorium. At home, Washington state and Oregon have banned deep-sea mining in state waters.

Brian Menell, the chair and CEO of TechMet, a company that invests in mining operations, said the companies that signed the moratorium “are playing to a Greenpeace media audience.”

“There’s no particular cost in ruling it out for the time being,” said Menell, who noted that TechMet has no plans to invest in seabed mining operations at this time. “There are a lot of unknowns in terms of the cost and environmental impact. They could change their mind in five years’ time.”

Still, the industry is seeing investor interest, said Renee Grogan, the chief sustainability officer for Impossible Mining, a new venture looking to use artificial intelligence and robots to detect and pick up only mineral-rich nodules on the seafloor that aren’t supporting life.

“The investment side of things has been easier than the customer side of things, which are the large vehicle manufacturers. There’s a lot of investor interest around delivering battery metals in a sustainable way that can give us a secure supply chain,” Grogan said. “The challenge is the perception that seabed mining can only be done with a dredging machine. That’s the perception we are challenging with our innovation.”