Cook Islands Seabed Minerals (Minerals Harvesting and Other Mining) Regulations 2024

Mechanism

The Seabed Minerals Act 2009 (as amended in 2021/2023) created a two-tier licensing architecture — exploration licences and harvesting licences — but left the harvesting tier dormant pending subsidiary regulations. Serial 2024/11 fills that gap. The Regulations introduce:

• Production-licence application criteria: operators with exploration licences may

apply for harvesting licences once environmental-impact assessments are completed and the Minister approves; the SBMA holds discretion to refuse, impose conditions, or suspend licences.

• Environmental-assessment standards: mandatory environmental-impact assessment (EIA)

covering benthic habitat disturbance, sediment plume modelling, and deep-ocean ecosystem baseline data requirements before any harvesting application is evaluated.

• Royalty and benefit-sharing framework: establishes the structure under which the

Cook Islands government and local communities receive revenue shares from commercial extraction; specific royalty rates are to be set by the Seabed Minerals Commissioner per licence.

• Financial-assurance requirements: operators must post performance bonds and

decommissioning bonds sufficient to cover clean-up and restoration liabilities.

• Compliance and monitoring obligations: SBMA-designated observers aboard harvesting

vessels; real-time telemetry requirements; annual reporting.

The government emphasised that the Regulations are a governance and readiness instrument rather than a green-light for extraction: no harvesting licence can be issued without a separate Ministerial science-based determination. Critics — principally Te Ipukarea Society (TIS), the Cook Islands' leading conservation organisation — contended that issuing the legal framework before sufficient environmental baseline data is available risks signalling commercial intent prematurely and creates pressure to approve licences once sunk costs accumulate.

Geopolitical context: China-Cook Islands seabed minerals partnership

The Regulations were promulgated against a backdrop of intensifying Chinese strategic interest in the Cook Islands' nodule province. In February 2025 (four months after the Regulations' entry into force), China and the Cook Islands formalised a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, with the accompanying Action Plan 2025–2030 explicitly covering seabed-minerals cooperation. Simultaneously, the Cook Islands SBMA signed a five-year MoU with the Ministry of Natural Resources of China covering joint exploration, research, technology transfer, and deep-sea ecosystem research. This positions Chinese state-affiliated entities as potential counterparties for the first commercial harvesting licences — a material shift in the Western-vs-China competition for first-mover deep-sea mining output, particularly given that:

1. The three current exploration licence holders (CIC Ltd, Moana Minerals / Ocean Minerals LLC, Odyssey Marine Exploration) are Western-affiliated; the harvesting tier could see a different competitive landscape if Chinese state-backed offtake or JV arrangements are structured before the licensing gate opens. 2. The US signalled interest in a counter-partnership through the US–Cook Islands Seabed Minerals announcement (CSIS analysis, 2025), but as of mid-2025 no equivalent US framework MoU exists with the SBMA.

Supply-chain significance

The Cook Islands EEZ contains the Penrhyn Basin and other abyssal-plain nodule fields estimated to hold ~6.7 billion wet tonnes of polymetallic nodules at ~4,500–5,300 m depth. At typical nodule grades (~1.3% Ni, ~0.25% Co, ~1.0% Cu, ~25% Mn dry-weight), a full commercial extraction programme could represent a material fraction of global battery-metals supply if it proceeds. The direct peers are:

• Norway's Stortinget seabed-mining authorisation (January 2024, filed

2024-01-09-norway-stortinget-seabed-mining-authorisation): opened Arctic continental shelf to commercial licensing, including the Clarion-Clipperton Zone analogue carbonate-sulfide deposits.

• ISA Mining Code (stalled as of 2025): the international governance process whose

delay has created the jurisdictional vacuum that national EEZ frameworks like Cook Islands' are filling.

• TMC / Nauru NORI-D ISA application: the leading ISA-sponsored commercial nodule

project, whose licensing pathway remains blocked by the ISA two-year rule trigger.

Downstream implications

• Creates the legal pathway for Cook Islands to potentially become the first sub-ISA

jurisdiction (alongside Norway) to issue commercial seabed-mining licences, from approximately 2027 onward, competing with terrestrial critical-mineral supply from Indonesia (Ni), DRC (Co), Chile (Cu).

• The China-SBMA MoU February 2025 creates a state-affiliated Chinese offtake /

technology vector into the first commercial harvesting framework — watch for licence applications or JV announcements from Chinese-connected entities.

• Environmental-assessment requirements will be a material gating factor: TIS and

international conservation groups have signalled legal challenge capacity if the SBMA proceeds toward harvesting licences without independent peer-reviewed EIA sign-off.

Open questions

• Will the Cook Islands government issue a harvesting readiness determination before the

2027 exploration-licence renewal cycle, or will the framework remain dormant?

• Does the China MoU on "technology transfer" create a preference for Chinese equipment

(collector vehicles, riser systems) in any future harvesting programme — creating infrastructure lock-in analogous to Huawei/5G?

• How will the Cook Islands framework interact with the ISA Mining Code if the Code is

eventually adopted — will CK EEZ operators be subject to ISA environmental standards or only national SBMA standards?