China Refines Up to 95% of Four Battery Metals. The US Just Took a Deep-Sea Mining Bid to the Brink of Approval, Skipping the World's Rulebook.
For two decades, China built the refineries that turn raw ore into battery-grade nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese — so even mines the U.S. and its allies control still often ship concentrate to a Chinese smelter to become usable metal. This month, a U.S. regulator took the furthest step any government has ever taken toward mining four of those metals at once, from softball-sized rocks scattered across the Pacific floor, using a law that skips the international treaty every other seafaring nation follows.
From seafloor rock to refined metal
Step through the four stages of turning a Pacific nodule into usable battery metal. Depth and grade figures are typical Clarion-Clipperton Zone values, rounded for clarity. Stage 4's bars show China's approximate current share of global refining capacity for each metal — not where the ore itself is mined.
Over millions of years, dissolved manganese and iron slowly precipitate in rings around a tiny core — a shark's tooth, a bone fragment — building a potato-sized rock loaded with four metals at once. No drilling, no overburden: nodules just sit loose on the mud.
The plain version
Scattered across the Pacific seafloor between Hawaii and Mexico are billions of dark, potato-sized rocks called polymetallic nodules. They formed over millions of years as metal dissolved in seawater slowly built up in layers around a speck of debris — and unlike almost any metal deposit on land, each rock isn't one metal, it's four: manganese, nickel, copper and cobalt, all bundled together and just sitting loose on top of the mud instead of buried in rock you have to blast apart.
That would be a curiosity except those four metals are exactly what go into EV batteries, grid batteries and stainless steel — and mining them isn't actually the hard part. Refining is. China spent two decades building the smelters and processing plants that turn raw ore into battery-grade metal, so even when the U.S. or an ally controls a mine somewhere else in the world, the ore often still gets shipped to a Chinese refinery before it's usable. Refining, not digging, is the real chokepoint.
So this month, Washington did something no country has ever done before: a federal regulator found a mining company's plan to vacuum up those rocks at industrial scale to be fully compliant with U.S. law — the furthest any deep-sea mining bid has gotten, anywhere, using an American law from 1980 that has nothing to do with the international treaty every other seafaring nation follows. A final permit hasn't been issued yet, but a second, smaller company already signed a deal to study building the refinery piece on U.S. soil too, so the rocks wouldn't need to pass through China to become metal at all.
Nearly 40 countries, plus China, Russia and France, say this whole approach is illegal — the international rulebook treats the deep seabed as belonging to everyone, with no single country allowed to hand out mining permits on its own. The U.S. is betting it can get ships in the water before the legal fight catches up.
The expert version
Polymetallic nodules form through slow (millimeter-per-million-years) hydrogenetic and diagenetic precipitation of manganese and iron oxides around a nucleus — often a shark's tooth, bone fragment, or rock chip — concentrated across the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a roughly 4.5-million-km² abyssal plain between Hawaii and Mexico at 4,000–6,000 m depth. A typical nodule assays around 28% manganese, 1.3% nickel, 1.1% copper and 0.2% cobalt by dry weight, with higher-grade nodules running closer to 2.5% nickel and 2% copper — richer in nickel and copper than most producing land mines, and carrying four payable metals in one ore body instead of the usual one or two. Region-wide CCZ estimates run to roughly 21–34 billion (wet or dry, depending on the study) tons of nodules, equivalent to several times known terrestrial reserves of cobalt and nickel.
The regulatory track: an April 24, 2025 executive order ("Unleashing America's Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources") directed Commerce and NOAA to process seabed-mining permits under the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act (DSHMRA) rather than through UNCLOS and the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a body the U.S. never joined. On February 6, 2026, The Metals Company's U.S. subsidiary filed a consolidated application covering 65,000 km² of the CCZ for both exploration and commercial recovery; NOAA found it in full compliance on April 28, 2026 — a procedural finding, not a final permit grant, but the furthest any deep-sea commercial-recovery bid has advanced in any jurisdiction. Separately, on September 23, 2026, Deep Sea Minerals Corp. and Westwin Elements signed a non-binding letter of intent to evaluate U.S.-based processing of nodules, aimed squarely at the actual bottleneck: independent of where ore is mined, China holds an estimated 95% of refined manganese capacity, 78% of refined cobalt, 45% of refined copper and 35% of refined nickel.
The legal exposure is real: UNCLOS treats seabed resources beyond national jurisdiction as the "common heritage of mankind," administered exclusively through the ISA. Because DSHMRA permits carry no ISA sanction, roughly 40 states plus China, Russia and France have backed a formal ISA statement calling unilateral permitting unlawful, and at least one 2026 legal analysis has floated the possibility of Chinese countermeasures or sanctions. No nodule has yet been extracted at commercial scale anywhere; the real test comes once a collector-and-riser system attempts sustained, continuous production, targeted for 2027.
Why it matters for tech + supply chain: the batteries in EVs, phones and grid storage all need nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese — this is the first serious attempt to mine and refine them somewhere China doesn't control the processing step, even though the legal fight over doing it this way has barely started.
Why it matters for tech + supply chain: if DSHMRA permitting survives the coming legal challenges, it sets a non-ISA precedent other states could copy — but the more consequential race isn't the mining permit, it's whether U.S. nodule-processing capacity actually gets built before China's refining leverage over these four metals becomes structurally permanent.