If U.S. remains outside UNCLOS, U.S. firms will have no legal rights to deep seabed mining resources

Moreover, to mine deep seabed minerals requires security of tenure for the billion dollar plus costs of such an operation. Our industry has emphatically reminded us that they cannot mine under a fishing approach in which mining is a free-for-all concept, as the critics seem to suggest. Rather, they must have both the exclusive rights to mine sites and international recognition of titles to the minerals recovered. These requirements led to the formation of a limited international agency to provide security of tenure and title for mineral resources of the seabed beyond national jurisdiction, which was otherwise owned by no one. The ISA was a necessary specialized agency of strictly limited jurisdiction to deal with security of tenure and stable property rights so that investors can amortize their debt. Quite contrary to the recent testimony of one critic before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, the ISA would not have "the exclusive right to regulate what is done, by whom, when and under what circumstances in subsurface international waters and on the sea-floor." (12) Rather, the ISA is a small, narrowly mandated international agency that has emphatically no ability to control the water column and only functional authority over the mining of the minerals of the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction. Again, this is a necessary requirement for seabed mining, an area beyond which any nation has sovereignty, to provide security of tenure to mine sites, without which mining will not occur. By not adhering to the treaty, the United States will simply lose its deep seabed mine sites--the best in the world--and our seabed mining industry will be permanently deep-sixed.