Vancouver company pushing deep-sea mining in U.S. waters under Trump

Gerard Barron, CEO of the Metals Co., a Vancouver-headquartered deep-sea mining corporation, appeared optimistic as he left the White House in April 2025. He posted a photo from the West Wing to social media, saying his company was "preparing to work diligently alongside" the Trump administration to promote critical minerals security for the United States.

Barron was meeting with undisclosed senior U.S. officials to discuss the Metals Co.'s readiness to become the first corporation to commercially mine the ocean floor. Days after that visit, Trump signed an executive order, "Unleashing America's Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources," that expedites deep-sea mining in U.S. domestic waters and allows the United States to unilaterally expedite mining in the international seabed — widely considered the common heritage of humankind.

When Trump signed the order, Barron and his colleagues sent the president a gift: a metals-rich rock vacuumed up from the Pacific Ocean floor, encased in glass and engraved with the company's logo and a U.S. flag. The five-million-year-old rock now sits on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

Days after the order, the Metals Co.'s U.S. subsidiary applied for permits to explore and commercially mine the seabed in the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii. In late April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determined one application — for an area more than twice the size of Vancouver Island — was in full compliance and could proceed. In May, the same administration certified a separate application for a Pacific seabed area considerably larger than Iceland.

The Metals Co. says it expects to begin commissioning its mining system next year, once it receives final approval. "We're talking about a resource that's approaching a trillion dollars' worth of value," Barron told Mining.com in January. "The thing that stands in the way of us unlocking that value is the permit to be able to go and extract them and sell them."

The plan raises questions for Canada: Is the Metals Co. violating international law by ignoring the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which prohibits unilateral deep-sea mining in international waters? Can Canada — one of 43 countries calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining — prevent the company from mining internationally? Canada has said nothing publicly about Trump's deep-sea mining order so far.