Norway's First Licensing Round for Seabed Minerals

The Norwegian Offshore Directorate invites players to nominate blocks for the first licensing round for mineral activities on the seabed expected in spring 2025.

The Norwegian Offshore Directorate is currently working to prepare for the first licensing round. They have recently invited the industry to nominate blocks.

The nomination must be received by the Norwegian Offshore Directorate by 12:00 on 21 May 2024.

First Licence Expected Spring 2025

The Ministry of Energy presented the resource management strategy and steps forward in the licensing process at our seminar during the One Ocean Week.

They expects granting of licenses in the spring 2025, where exploration will be the first step and emphasise that mining is only approved if it is demonstrated that extraction can be done in an environmental responsible and profitable way.

The first extraction plans have to be approved by the Norwegian parliament (Stortinget).

The government plans to strengthen the exploration work and believes in a close collaboration between the industry and the government.

Data Release From 2022-2024

Hilde Braut, assistant director in the Norwegian Offshore Directorate presented an updated status on the exploration work performed.

A large part of earlier data acquired was released in June 2022. Now the data from 2022-2024 has been released, in addition to the data from the NTNU headed MarMine-project in 2016.

Read more about how to access the data.

Hilde listed different data of interest on reduce the uncertainty span on the resource estimate. Coring is key to better estimate the ore grade, but also better bathymetry, geochemical analysis, seismic and so on is needed to better quantify the resource potential.

Learning from International Work

Thomas Dahlgren, researcher at NORCE, has taken part in several research expeditions in the Pacific. He explained the main difference between ocean ecosystems and ongoing work to learn more about the deep-sea and its functioning.

He exemplified some of the international standards and requirements to acquired environment baseline data. A key challenge today is limited knowledge to establish environment assessment based on. At the moment we do not have sufficient knowledge to manage the deep-sea resources similar as the activities on the shelf, Dahlgren explains.

The Industry is Ready

Several industry players presented their activities to prepare for the first licensing round. Anette Broch Mathisen Tvedt, CEO Adepth Minerals presented the good experience with industry-university collaboration in the EMINENT-project.

She believes Norway has all the pre-requisites to take a global leading position within management of deep-sea resources and establish a national supply chain for critical minerals. Anette emphasized that Adepth will only start deep-sea mining if it can be done with a low environmental impact.

Espen Simonstad, Senior Advisor Geoscience in Green Minerals presented promising results from blending high ore grade seafloor massive sulphides with low ore grade cobber deposits from land. This is a win-win for all parties, as it can prolong the life of current mines. Espen encourages us to think land and ocean, not land or ocean.