Economic and Legal Developments, 1983–2000

Deep-Sea minerals development entered a period of difficulty in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Mineral prices were too low to sustain profitable ventures, UNCLOS III had not been favourable to potential deep-sea mining and the increasing cost of meeting expected environmental regulations mitigated against it. The commercial programme in the Red Sea remained on hold and there were no new commercial hydrothermal minerals developments until the twenty-first century when attempts (ultimately unsuccessful) were made to bring the SOLWARA deposit in the Bismarck Sea into production. There was also little or no new nodule exploration by the Industrial Consortia, but the existing (in 1980) National Consortia mostly extended their work and new National Consortia entered the field. Cobalt-rich crust exploration and evaluation was prominent in the 1980s but by the 1990s had largely subsided. Discussions were held in the early 1990s in an attempt to make the Law of the Sea more “user friendly” to potential deep-sea miners, culminating in the Implementing Agreement (IA) of 1994. Even this did not result in deep-sea mining going ahead, and none was carried out in the twentieth century.