Nauru Built the Only Door Into Deep-Sea Mining — Washington Just Opened a Second One

On 19 November, the United States plans to auction two seabed blocks off American Samoa — more than 31 million acres combined — for a minimum bid of $3 million apiece, live-streamed from a federal office in California. No exploration contract. No sponsoring state. No International Seabed Authority. Just a federal lease, issued under a domestic mining law from 1980, for the same kind of polymetallic nodules that Nauru spent a decade building an entire national strategy around controlling. Washington did not need Nauru’s permission, its sponsorship, or its seat at the table in Kingston. It only needed its own waters and its own statute. That should worry Pacific capitals more than any headline about Chinese seabed ambitions.

Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, mineral nodules in international waters belong to no one — they are the “common heritage of mankind,” administered by the International Seabed Authority, and a company can only mine them by contracting through a sponsoring state. That rule is why Nauru, one of the world’s smallest and poorest nations, sponsors Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. (NORI), a subsidiary of Canada’s The Metals Company (TMC), in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. In 2021, Nauru triggered a UNCLOS provision forcing the ISA to finish its “mining code” within two years. That deadline passed in 2023 with no code agreed, and none exists today. The United States, notably, never ratified UNCLOS and was never an ISA member — but it left a 1980 domestic law, the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, dormant for over four decades. In April 2025, Washington switched it on.

Nauru’s entire bargaining position rested on one assumption: that the ISA framework was the only legal route into the nodule fields, which made Nauru’s sponsorship indispensable to any company that wanted them. That assumption no longer holds, and TMC’s own conduct is the proof.

In March 2025, as the ISA’s mining-code deadline slipped for the second time, TMC’s chief financial officer told investors the company still intended to file for the NORI licence area — but “has not yet determined with which regulator.” Not whether to seek ISA approval. Which regulator. Within weeks, TMC’s American subsidiary had filed with NOAA under the newly reactivated 1980 law, covering the same class of Clarion-Clipperton nodules NORI was exploring under Nauru’s sponsorship. By August 2026, NOAA had certified that filing as fully compliant and expanded it twice, to a consolidated area of roughly 65,000 square kilometres plus a second block of 122,000 more — a final decision is expected by early 2027. Nauru lawyer Duncan Currie called the pivot “extremely insulting and concerning to the Pacific,” adding that Pacific nations “have been lent on, pushed, coaxed” for years. He is not wrong, but the more precise problem is structural: once TMC signalled it saw Nauru’s sponsorship and Washington’s licence as substitutes, Nauru stopped being a gatekeeper and became one bidder in a negotiation with itself.

Nauru did notch a real win this summer. When the ISA’s Legal and Technical Commission opened a compliance inquiry into NORI in March, alleging the company’s American filings created conflicts under its ISA contract, NORI took the ISA to the Seabed Disputes Chamber — and won unanimously on 18 July. Two days later, the ISA Council extended NORI’s exploration contract five more years. Read one way, that is Nauru’s sponsorship model functioning exactly as designed. Read the other way, it is Nauru successfully defending its right to sponsor a company that, by its own CFO’s admission, may end up mining through Washington instead.

This would matter less if Pacific states could bargain as a bloc, the way they already do on tuna: the Parties to the Nauru Agreement pool access to skipjack stocks and have pushed collective licensing revenue from about $60 million a year in 2010 to roughly $500 million now. No equivalent exists for seabed minerals. The Pacific Islands Forum is instead split down the middle — Nauru, Tonga, Cook Islands and Kiribati see nodules as fiscal necessity; Palau, Fiji, Samoa, the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia want a moratorium — and Australia, the region’s largest partner, has stayed conspicuously neutral. A fragmented Pacific negotiates bilaterally, contract by contract, exactly the way TMC and Allseas prefer it: those two companies alone control more than 60% of the ISA’s contracts in areas set aside for developing states, while an African Group analysis pegs plausible royalty income at roughly $97,800 per ISA member per year — nowhere near the hundreds of millions mining companies pitch to host governments. Nauru has run this experiment before: a century of phosphate mining left much of its interior a moonscape and its sovereign trust fund collapsed. The sponsoring-state model was supposed to be the version of seabed extraction where a small state actually controlled the terms. It is looking like the same trap with an ISA logo attached.

The fair counter: Washington’s domestic permits, unlike Nauru’s ISA-backed contract, apply to waters most of the world still considers held in common, and much of the international legal community — including China and Russia, for once aligned with the West — is now pushing an ITLOS advisory opinion on exactly that question, with a decision on even requesting one deferred to next year’s ISA Assembly. Nauru’s legal position may hold up better in the end. But leverage is about what a company believes today, not what a tribunal might decide in 2028, and TMC has already told its shareholders it is hedging.

Base case (roughly 55%): Nothing resolves cleanly. The ISA mining code stays unfinished, the ITLOS advisory-opinion request stays stuck in consultations led by Malta, and Washington keeps advancing in parallel — the American Samoa auction proceeds on schedule and NOAA rules on TMC USA’s Clarion-Clipperton application by early 2027. Nauru keeps its NORI sponsorship and its five-year contract extension, but with steadily less practical weight as TMC’s American track matures. The Pacific Islands Forum stays split.

Downside case: TMC’s NOAA permit clears first and becomes the company’s priority commercial pathway, while its ISA exploitation application — pending since the mining code first stalled — never advances past exploration. The trigger would be a clean NOAA final decision in the first half of 2027 alongside continued ISA paralysis on the code itself; TMC has every commercial incentive to mine under whichever regime moves first; and it owes Nauru nothing once it does. Nauru is left holding a sponsorship agreement for a project that never converts into royalties, having spent years and real litigation costs — the ITLOS case, the compliance defence — protecting a door the company no longer needs to walk through.

Upside case: Washington’s aggressiveness becomes the shock that forces Pacific coordination the ISA process never did — a nodule-mining equivalent of the tuna-licensing bloc, in which Pacific states, moratorium and pro-mining camps alike, set one common floor for environmental standards and revenue share that any company must meet regardless of which regulator it uses. The plausible trigger is reputational rather than legal: a botched, under-consulted auction like American Samoa’s becoming a regional rallying point the way the tuna crisis once was. Nothing currently underway suggests this coordination is happening, which is exactly why it would be underpriced if it started.

The story Washington and Beijing would each like told is one about great-power competition for critical minerals. The story that actually matters is smaller and worse for the Pacific: Nauru built its entire seabed strategy on being an indispensable gatekeeper, and the company it sponsors has just shown it doesn’t believe that anymore. Watch what happens to NORI’s ISA exploitation application — not its exploration contract, which Nauru just successfully defended, but the actual permit to mine — over the next year. If it keeps stalling while TMC’s NOAA licence moves toward approval, Nauru will have won every legal fight over a door nobody needed to use.