Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said on September 14, 2026 that the United States could issue deep-sea mining permits within months. He was speaking at the G20 Ministerial Meeting on Energy Abundance in Houston, which the United States is hosting. Asked when the permits would be issued, he gave no date.

DATES ALREADY FIXED

    •    November 19, 2026: the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management proposes to hold the American Samoa lease sale, PACM-1. Two lease areas are on offer, of about 16,332,256 and 15,170,979 acres, roughly 127,000 square kilometers together. Bidding would be by ascending oral auction.
    •    December 16, 2026: a second sale, PACM-2, offshore the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
    •    October 13 and October 19, 2026: NOAA’s virtual hearing on The Metals Company USA’s consolidated application, and the close of written comments on it.
    •    No commercial recovery permit has ever been issued under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, which became law in 1980.
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Two regimes, and they work in opposite ways

Burgum’s department does not control all of this. Two departments issue two different things, in two different places, and the instruments are not equivalent.

Burgum runs Interior, so his months point at the Interior side: the two auctions. NOAA sits in Commerce and he does not control it. Even there the word “permits” is loose. What is scheduled within months is a lease sale. The approval a company actually needs to mine, an approved Mining Plan, comes later, after a winner has filed its plans.

INTERIOR, INSIDE UNITED STATES WATERS

The Marine Minerals Administration, MMA, the Interior bureau that still files in the Federal Register as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, leases minerals on the Outer Continental Shelf. That is American Samoa, the Northern Marianas, and the areas off Virginia and Alaska.

    •    The instrument is a lease, and it is sold. PACM-1 is an ascending oral auction with a minimum bonus bid of US$3 million for each area. The highest bidder wins it.
    •    A lease is not an exploration permit. The regulations define one as covering “exploration for, and development and production of, specific minerals,” and BOEM’s leasing notice says any lease issued at PACM-1 “will grant rights to develop” the nodule and ferromanganese crust deposits. The mining rights come with the lease.
    •    What the lease does not do is let work begin. Delineation, testing and production each need a plan approved by the bureau, and production happens under an approved Mining Plan.
    •    The term is 20 years. Royalties run at 5 percent on anything sold under a Delineation or Testing Plan, then 2 percent for the first five years of Mining Plan production and 5 percent after that. There is no royalty relief in this sale.

Commerce, on the high seas

NOAA licenses the seabed beyond any nation’s jurisdiction, under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act of 1980. That is every application in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and the Penrhyn Basin, and Interior has no part in it.

    •    Nothing is sold. There is no auction and no bonus bid. A company applies, NOAA decides whether the application is compliant, the public comments, and an environmental impact statement follows.
    •    Priority runs on the filing date rather than on money. NOAA told American Metal Resources and SeaX they hold priority of right only where their areas do not conflict with an earlier applicant, and told American Ocean Minerals that an earlier filer outranks it over the northern half of its Penrhyn area.
    •    Exploration and mining are two separate instruments. An exploration license covers surveying and sampling and runs ten years. Mining needs a commercial recovery permit, applied for and granted separately. Since January 21, 2026 an applicant may seek both at once in a consolidated application, which is what TMC USA has done.
    •    No commercial recovery permit has ever been issued.
  
So the two systems are close to mirror images. Interior sells the mining rights at the start and controls what happens afterwards through plan approvals. NOAA sells nothing, ranks applicants by who filed first, and keeps the decision on mining back as a second instrument that no company has yet been granted.

Why it matters

United States access to critical minerals has tightened as China has limited exports of processed material, and that is the pressure behind the schedule. On the Interior side, Burgum’s months are two auctions on dates that already exist. On the Commerce side they are a first commercial recovery decision whose comment period closes in October. The six NOAA application areas come to about 814,000 square kilometers before any overlaps are removed, and the two Interior lease areas add roughly 127,000 more.

BACKGROUND

The Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act was passed in 1980 as an interim measure, to let United States companies work the high-seas floor while a treaty was negotiated. The United States never ratified the resulting Law of the Sea convention and is not a member of the International Seabed Authority. NOAA issued exploration licenses under the Act in the 1980s. It has never issued a commercial recovery permit.

The current round starts with Executive Order 14285, Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources, signed on April 24, 2025. It directed NOAA to expedite review of exploration licenses beyond national jurisdiction, and directed Interior to move on the Outer Continental Shelf. Interior began folding BOEM and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement into the Marine Minerals Administration in 2026.

NOAA revised its own rules on January 21, 2026, so that an applicant can seek an exploration license and a commercial recovery permit in a single consolidated application. TMC USA and AOM Area-1 have both used that route.

WHAT TO WATCH
    •    October 13, 2026: NOAA’s virtual hearing on TMC USA’s consolidated application.
    •    October 19, 2026: written comments close on that application, and the Governor of the Northern Mariana Islands’ comments on the PACM-2 leasing notice are due.
    •    Mid-October 2026: a final leasing notice must be published at least 30 days before PACM-1, so that is when the American Samoa sale is either confirmed or slips.
    •    November 19 and December 16, 2026: the two proposed lease sales.
    •    Undated: NOAA decisions on the American Metal Resources, SeaX and American Deep Sea Minerals applications, and a first Federal Register notice for the two American Ocean Minerals applications.