Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Lockheed Martin is in talks with mining companies to allow exploitation of its Pacific seabed licensing areas as global competition to secure access to critical minerals intensifies.
The American defence group was awarded the two eastern Pacific licences in international waters by US regulators in the early 1980s during the first flush of interest in deep sea mining but never started work on them.
Frank St John, Lockheed’s chief operating officer, said there was now a “large interest” in the company’s deposits from groups involved in undersea mining.
“We are in early stages of conversations with several companies about giving them access to our licences and allowing them to process those materials,” he told the Financial Times.
Interest in critical raw materials has surged as global competition for minerals used in everything from batteries for electric vehicles to modern defence technologies has intensified. China’s dominance of critical minerals has accelerated plans by western countries to find ways to bolster domestic supply chains.
St John declined to elaborate on the potential value of the deposits in Lockheed’s licences, saying only that the mining companies had “done the homework and determined there is value there”. He stressed that it was “early days”.
President Donald Trump in April signed an executive order asserting America’s right to issue licences to mine in international waters and suggesting seabed metals could be stockpiled as strategic assets.
In recent months start-ups either headquartered or listed in the US have applied for licences to mine nodules on the seabed that can contain nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese.
A de facto ban on mining in international waters has been in place since the 1990s, raising questions about the legality of any unilateral move to kick-start the industry.
Some experts say the industry would struggle to compete on costs with land-based mining. Lockheed in 2023 sold its two UK-backed exploration licences in the Pacific, widely interpreted at the time as a no-confidence vote in the industry.
The regulator for deep-sea mining in international waters, the International Seabed Authority, is meeting for crunch talks in Jamaica this month to discuss the conditions under which it would allow mining to start.
Representatives from 169 countries as well as the European Union have spent years hashing out a system of environmental safeguards, royalties and taxation that has yet to be finalised.
The US has not ratified the treaty from which the ISA derives its authority but has signed an agreement recognising the treaty’s seabed provisions. It has its own licensing process administered by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Thirty-seven countries have thrown their weight behind a movement to pause or stop efforts to start mining, citing the risk of harm to the wildlife that survives thousands of metres under the surface of the ocean under immense pressure and with little light or oxygen.
Lockheed told the FT the company appreciated the “Trump administration’s focus on ensuring reliable sources of critical minerals, including the ocean”.
“We believe the US has the opportunity to develop a gold standard for commercial recovery of nodules in an environmentally responsible manner,” the company added.
Separately, St John said Lockheed was taking steps to ensure it had access to key raw materials as part of its overall focus on bolstering its supply chains. The company is working with the Pentagon to “identify what are the resources that are going to be needed to either create a stockpile of material or create an alternate source”.
In some cases, said St John, the company was investing its own capital to “go out and secure those stockpiles”, for example through agreements with mining companies.
The company recently managed to put in place an alternative source plan for germanium as well as titanium, according to St John, who stressed that Lockheed had not experienced any “issues or slowdown in any production”.
Additional reporting by Leslie Hook in London
