Interest in deep-sea mining has increased globally in recent years. And even as the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the U.N. body responsible for overseeing the activity in international waters, continues to deliberate its regulatory framework, companies seek out loopholes to get their projects underway.

In Brazil, a study carried out by the Mining Observatory, a Mongabay reporting partner, has revealed a surge in requests to prospect for minerals in Brazilian waters. Of the 950 applications registered with the National Mining Agency (ANM) since 1967, 456 were filed between 2020 and the end of 2024. Most sought permission to mine off the coasts of the states of Maranhão, Bahia and Espírito Santo.

This boom of interest in seabed mineral deposits is driven by economic incentives, in particular the accelerated pace of the clean energy transition and demand for minerals that are strategic for renewable energy sources. Some are so strategic that they’re being used as an argument to justify exploration without sufficient environmental impact studies in sensitive zones such as the ocean floor.

The substances most sought off the Brazilian coast are phosphate and potassium salts. These are followed closely by three types of limestone and calcareous shells, all of which are potential raw material for the fertilizer industry. A calcified red marine algae called Lithothamnion found in the deep waters off the Brazilian coast is the most cited substance in requests for environmental licensing.

In its efforts to reduce its dependence on imports of these raw materials, Brazil has taken action on many fronts to increase their exploration, starting under the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, the president from 2019-2023, and continuing under his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Critical and strategic minerals like ilmenite, titanium and lithium also appear on the Brazilian government’s target list. Another is rock salt — the substance responsible for the Braskem disaster in Maceió, capital of Alagoas state, where mining for the mineral has led to widespread land subsidence affecting thousands of homes on Brazil’s northeastern coast.

Paulo Sumida, head of the University of São Paulo’s Oceanographic Institute, says the burgeoning number of requests to the National Mining Agency is related to an acceleration in the search for critical minerals on the seabed driven by the global race for net-zero emissions in the medium term.

“The geopolitical scenario isn’t helping, with frequent clashes between China and the United States for supremacy in this area. Access to these minerals means enormous economic advantages today. And our nation has an extensive coastline, offering great potential for the exploitation of these resources,” Sumida says.

His environmental concerns center around the loss of marine biodiversity. According to Sumida, seabed biodiversity in deep waters is vibrant and has very different cycles to that found in shallow waters, requiring special management in these regions.

“Warnings from scientists about the dangers of this exploration could lead to pressure for a moratorium on the activity. The fact is that we want to explore an enormous region and at least need to know what the real global impact will be,” Sumida says. “We are experiencing three planetary crises today: the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and the pollution crisis. We can’t talk about one without addressing the others. The loss of biodiversity is a serious issue that could lead to an unprecedented collapse of the ecosystem the likes of which humanity has never seen.”

Just like mining on land, deep-sea mining brings with it many environmental risks. André Klumb, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia, says extraction of the Brazilian deposits would be done by scraping the ocean floor.

“The environmental impacts related to research and exploitation of resources on the ocean floor by means of seabed dragging would create a sedimentation plume able to travel long distances depending on the density of the suspended material,” Klumb says. “Marine currents would carry them and eventually cover the surfaces of algae and corals kilometers away from the mining sites. Species that live on seabed sediments would also be directly affected.”

Legislative loopholes

In Brazil’s case, the Mining Observatory study found that many companies are being granted authorization to extract marine substances without environmental licensing.

This happens thanks to a mechanism known as the “User Guide,” which was intended to be used under rare circumstances, but has now become commonplace, granted to thousands of companies in recent years by the National Mining Agency.

This authorization now only requires that companies present their environmental license within 10 days of receiving the guide. What happens in many cases is that companies take advantage of this loophole to never present a license.

Given the ANM’s lax oversight, companies manage to explore without any environmental go-ahead from IBAMA, the federal environmental protection agency, which is responsible for approvals. They also often exceed production limits set by the guide.

Extraction without environmental approvals was a loophole opened by the ANM itself and not revoked until questioned by the Federal Court of Auditors (TCU). In July 2024, the court deemed the concession of user guides to be illegal and determined that in other cases, the concession of the guide would require presentation of environmental licensing beforehand.

The deadline for change was January 2025, but the ANM has still not resolved the issue even though the date has passed. At least one request for deep-sea extraction has been granted by the agency since then, even without completed licensing and without any impact study required.

The TCU investigation also showed that the ANM’s board of directors was responsible for deleting, in June 2020, the legal framework that required licensing, in a measure that was unanimously approved in just 21 days. As result of this action by the ANM, the audit report cited nearly 90 cases of uncontrolled exploration in a sample period that only included activity until October 2023.

At the ANM, the user guide is meant to authorize the extraction of certain substances before the granting of a mining concession. The list of substances permitted by this mechanism is long, including everything from limestone shells to iron ore, copper, diamonds, nickel and gold, in varying quantities.

But verification and licensing by both the ANM and IBAMA remain haphazard. The regulatory dismantling of environmental protections by Bolsonaro has left the agencies struggling to rebuild with insufficient budgets and a lack of personnel.

Even though auditors’ ruling requires companies to “respect current environmental legislation” and submit an annual mining report, the court acknowledged that this gray area that ends up favoring companies was created by the elimination of the requirement to present environmental licensing in advance.

According to former IBAMA head Suely Araújo, now the public policy coordinator at environmental think tank the Climate Observatory, the user guide should only be applied in situations allowed for under the law, such as viability studies or tests, and not as a means for ignoring environmental licensing.

“It allows for temporary exemption from a mining concession, not from environmental licensing. If the activity is on an insignificant or small scale, environmental licensing may be waived or a simplified process may be applied,” Araújo says.

In her view, “using the guide to eliminate licensing from [environmental] agencies is inadmissible and, in my opinion, may even result in the application of penal sanctions based on the Environmental Crimes Law. This also applies to offshore mining.”

Mining of living algae

Luigi Jovane is a professor at the University of São Paulo’s Department of Physical, Chemical and Geological Oceanography. He has analyzed data from IBAMA on the environmental licensing of companies that explore or intend to explore in Brazilian seas, and warns of other gaps in the processes beyond the lack of scientific study.

The first is that many licenses classified as operational are not actually “operation for experimental mining.” He says mining companies have been extracting “this way for many years,” especially in the states of Bahia and Espírito Santo. He also refers to possible process violations regarding declarations on the materials being mined.

“Companies are allowed to sell the material during the test phase. Therefore, it is to their advantage to have this sort of license,” Jovane says. “Another issue is their descriptions of the mined material. They call it Lithothamnion because this is the name for dead algae, but in truth, most of the time what they are extracting is living red algae and rhodoliths, which form the substrate of coral reefs in the Atlantic Ocean. It is nearly impossible to differentiate Lithothamnion from [living] red algae and from rhodoliths. They are very similar biologically and mineralogically.”

Jovane says this biological material could help to reduce the effects of climate changes. “Aside from being extremely important for biodiversity, living red algae and rhodoliths are among the strongest carbon sinks in the ocean. And they play a role in regulating the ocean’s temperature and its pH as a whole,” he says. “So the extraction of these materials could influence marine equilibrium and climate changes. But much more study is necessary.”

IBAMA says it has never authorized the extraction of red algae, and that companies using this method would be breaking regulations and causing impacts.

When questioned by Mining Observatory reporters, IBAMA’s response was: “Most of the related processes refer to the extraction of Lithothamnion, and there is no authorization for the extraction of red algae, rhodoliths or substances associated with corals. In order to understand the dynamics of the region [that is] the object of the extraction activity, a diagnosis is requested in order to avoid any impacts or damage to the biota.”

A lack of scientific studies

There are no specific rules or laws for the sector in terms of the environment, and licensing is based solely on a National Environmental Council (CONAMA) resolution from 1997.

The resolution doesn’t specifically address offshore mineral extraction. But in Article 4, it attributes responsibility to IBAMA for authorizing projects and activities with “significant environmental impact at national or regional level, located or developed,” and “in the territorial sea; continental shelf; in the exclusive economic zone.”

The ANM doesn’t have a separate set of rules from those that it imposes for mining on land. The references for this ruling are the “Mining Code, its regulations and legislation ancillary to the Code,” which include the use of permits, the agency says. The Brazilian Mining Code dates back to 1967.

“The legislation is not strong,” Jovane says. “This is because our mining legislation is based on activities carried out on the continent. At sea, there is really no existing legislation appropriate for some [marine] characteristics.”

He adds that companies don’t want this information to get out: “There is a huge knowledge gap that needs to be filled.”

According to Araújo, IBAMA doesn’t need specific regulations “and analyzes each process individually.” In response to the report, the agency acknowledged that “there is no specific regulation on the subject.” According to IBAMA, “environmental licensing for offshore mining activities complies with environmental legislation, including that relating to [land-based] mining,” and added that it’s “continuously improving all procedures based on the experience gained from previous licensing.”

Jovane says marine protection is still tenuous in Brazil, and that no mitigation is required of companies that want to explore the seabed.

“We need to conduct more studies on the possible impact of removing this material from the seabed and replacing it with other materials in other areas,” he says.

He maintains that if Brazil were to permit a large amount of mining activity in its ocean, “accumulations of sediment could form and result in huge impacts.”

“The risk also increases exponentially. And all of this needs to be studied. There are not many scientific studies, very few in fact,” Jovane says.

Alex Bastos, a professor in the Department of Oceanography and Ecology at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), echoes the view. “One of the greatest risks we face in the marine environment is not having a good study using leading-edge technology that can minimize risks and evaluate mitigation, since we still know little about the ocean floor,” he says.

He adds that knowledge about deep-sea ecosystem processes and biodiversity, which he defines as those occurring below a depth of 200 meters (660 feet), is still limited and that “we need to have all the data on the table so that we can make decisions based on science.”

Bastos says another issue that worsens the situation in Brazil is the spate of political attacks targeted at agencies like IBAMA, which has affecting their ability to properly fulfill their roles, as in the case of environmental licensing.

“With the dismantling that was carried out and the harassment that occurred under the previous government [of Bolsonaro], you can have the best legislation,” he says. “But if the agency is weakened politically, it can’t be effective. Today things are improving, there are training projects underway, but this needs to be a constant process.”

Bastos says defining what will be exploration areas and what will be protected is where marine spatial planning comes in, a new field in Brazil. “The responsible and balanced creation of zoning for the ocean floor is the only way we will achieve sustainability,” he says.

 
Banner image of deep-sea mining equipment from The Metals Company, which isn’t among those applying to mine in Brazilian waters. Image courtesy of Richard Baron/The Metals Company.

This story was first published here in Portuguese on May 22, 2025.