China enters race with foreign rivals to mine the seabed for valuable minerals

With China recently achieving its long-held desire to exploit untapped underwater resources, a new method of sustaining its rapid economic development appeared to be secure.

The award of exploration contracts last month for valuable minerals by the 165-member International Seabed Authority, which regulates deep-sea mining activities, approved exploration plans for cobalt-rich ferromanganese crusts by both China and Japan.

China can now legally poke around on a Western Pacific seamount, while Japan can venture beneath international waters off the isolated Japanese coral atoll of Minamitorishima. Both areas measure about 3,000 square kilometres - nearly three times the size of Hong Kong.

China is the only nation authorised to explore seabeds for as many as three major types of minerals, as it faces the depletion of natural resources at home and rising mineral prices abroad.

But the drive to mine the ocean floors has come up against unforeseen hurdles. China first secured the rights to explore for polymetallic nodules - lumps found on the ocean floor where layers of metals have formed around a rock core - in the northeast Pacific in 2001, and for polymetallic sulphide deposits in the southwest Indian Ocean two years ago.

China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association (Comra) clinched the latest contract, along with the earlier contracts in 2001 and 2011.

The goal is to mine cobalt crusts, which are rich in iron, and hydroxide deposits containing significant concentrations of cobalt, titanium, nickel, platinum, molybdenum, tellurium, cerium and other metals and rare earth elements.