The United States has never issued a domestic license for deep-sea mineral exploration. Last week, the formal process that could lead to the first one began — at least for TMC's U.S. subsidiary. NOAA published a Notice of Intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for the subsidiary's application to explore roughly 122,000 km² of Pacific seafloor, an area about the size of England.
Shares closed 20.65% higher at $4.7900, on dollar volume of about $96.9 million, in the days after the company announced the development on August 17.
For a shareholder, the distinction between what this is and what it is not matters. An exploration license is not permission to mine. If granted, it would allow TMC USA to send equipment to the seafloor to collect scientific and engineering data. What makes the licensing process meaningful is that it is moving — and that the area in question is large. The company's own technical report, published in August 2025 and cited in the filing, estimates the USA-B application area holds about 1.02 billion tonnes of polymetallic nodules containing nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese and meaningful quantities of rare earth elements.
The process NOAA has started is a structured federal environmental study required before any major government action that could affect the environment. NOAA will publish a draft version of that study, along with proposed terms and conditions for the exploration activities, for public comment. After reviewing those comments, it will issue a final version, then decide whether to grant the license. There is no statutory deadline under U.S. deep-seabed mining law by which NOAA must finish.
The USA-B application cleared an earlier hurdle on May 26, 2026, when NOAA certified it as formally complete. That certification opened the door to the substantive environmental review now underway.
TMC is running a second U.S. track alongside it. A separate application covering the USA-A area — this one combining an exploration license request and a commercial recovery permit — was submitted to NOAA on January 22, 2026, and declared fully compliant on April 28, 2026. The two applications cover different parts of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a stretch of Pacific seafloor between Hawaii and Mexico that has drawn commercial attention for decades because of its nodule density.
The company says independent researchers have published 41 peer-reviewed studies based on data it collected from the eastern portion of the zone. It says the USA-B exploration activities, if licensed, would generate new data from the central and western sections, with academics free to publish their findings.
What NOAA does next — and how long it takes — is the open question TMC's shareholders are now waiting on.