Uprise RI · Ryan MacMahonaghan · September 6, 2026
The Trump administration has begun a federal leasing process that could produce the Atlantic's first seabed minerals lease sale, off Virginia. The Conservation Law Foundation warns the push threatens New England fisheries and right whales.
Rhode Island's $2.5 billion marine economy, its $72 million commercial fishery and its $8.8 million aquaculture industry all depend on a productive Atlantic shelf – the same system federal regulators are now weighing for dredge mining.
The Trump administration's campaign to strip minerals from the ocean floor has arrived on the East Coast – not yet as a mine, but as a federal leasing process that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management describes as "the first steps toward what could become the Atlantic's first-ever OCS minerals lease sale," and that the Conservation Law Foundation warned this week could damage marine habitat, disrupt food chains and imperil the fisheries and endangered whales that New England's coastal economy depends on.
The proposal sits offshore Virginia, hundreds of miles from Point Judith and Galilee. But the ocean does not observe state lines, and for a state whose marine economy NOAA values at $2.5 billion in annual GDP and $1.3 billion in annual wages, the prospect of a new extraction industry on the Atlantic continental shelf is not an abstraction.
The legal groundwork was laid on April 24, 2025, when President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14285 , titled "Unleashing America's Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources." The order directs NOAA to expedite exploration licenses and commercial-recovery permits for seabed areas beyond national jurisdiction, and directs the Interior Department to expedite permits and leases for mineral resources on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf – all, the order says, "consistent with applicable law." It frames the enterprise as a matter of economic growth, reindustrialization, military preparedness, domestic supply chains and competition with China, and promises "streamlined permitting without compromising environmental and transparency standards."
The order was national policy. The Virginia proposal is where that policy first touched the Atlantic.
On November 13, 2025, according to the Federal Register notice BOEM later published, the agency received an unsolicited request to lease hard minerals offshore Virginia. Seven months later, on June 23, BOEM published a Request for Information and Interest on potential commercial mineral leasing there, describing it as the first step that could potentially lead to a lease sale. Acting BOEM Director Matt Giacona, in the agency's June 22 announcement, cast Virginia's offshore minerals as a possible way to strengthen domestic critical-mineral supply chains. The comment period, originally set to close July 23, was extended through August 22. It is now shut, and the agency says it is evaluating whether to advance toward a competitive lease sale.
BOEM is careful to insist that the request for information "does not constitute a decision to hold a lease sale." That is true, and it matters: no Atlantic lease has been awarded, no extraction has been authorized, and the agency's own Virginia page lays out a sequence – area identification, environmental analysis, a proposed leasing notice, a final leasing notice, a competitive sale – that must run before a shovel, or a dredge, touches the seabed. Even a lease, BOEM says, would initially authorize only preliminary mapping, with subsequent plans and approvals required before anything is removed.
But the same page also names the target. The principal Atlantic deposits under consideration are heavy-mineral sands and phosphorites, and BOEM says extraction, if ultimately approved, would likely involve hopper dredging followed by onshore mineral separation and processing. This is not the robotic vacuuming of polymetallic nodules from the abyssal Pacific that has dominated the international debate over deep-sea mining. It is closer to industrial-scale dredging of the continental shelf – a shallower, more familiar technology, and one with a longer record of disturbing the seafloor.
That distinction cuts both ways. The Virginia project is not the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. It is also not hypothetical engineering; dredges exist, and they work.
CLF, the Boston-based environmental legal organization with a long presence in Rhode Island, published its warning on September 4. The organization argues that dredging and other seabed-mining techniques could disturb sediment and generate plumes that smother organisms, destroy habitat, alter food chains, and add underwater noise and vessel traffic to waters used by North Atlantic right whales – one of the most endangered large whales on Earth, and a species whose migration corridor runs along the very coast in question. CLF says those effects could reach New England fisheries, and says it is fighting the Virginia proposal.
Those are the organization's projections, not the findings of a completed environmental review – no project-specific review of the Virginia proposal has yet been done. NOAA's own 2025 state-of-the-science fact sheet states that no commercial-scale deep-sea mining has occurred anywhere in the world. BOEM, for its part, acknowledges that later stages of the Virginia process would require environmental studies and consultations under the Endangered Species Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and the Coastal Zone Management Act, and it points to prior agency research on fish-habitat associations, dredging effects and offshore shoals. The agency says potential impacts to fishing, shipping and energy development may be addressed through public comments and subsequent environmental analysis, and describes its process as grounded in science, public engagement and environmental stewardship.
The administration, in other words, is asking the public to trust a review process that its own executive order instructed agencies to expedite.
The stakes for Rhode Island are measurable even if the risk is not yet quantified. The state Department of Environmental Management's 2024 fisheries report recorded 61,114,760 pounds of commercial landings worth $72 million at the dock, across 102 species harvested and landed. The most valuable of them – longfin squid, Atlantic sea scallop, American lobster, Illex squid and summer flounder – are creatures of the continental shelf, dependent on the sediment, prey and water quality of the same broad Atlantic system BOEM is now contemplating for extraction. Add the aquaculture sector, which the Coastal Resources Management Council reported at $8.8 million in farm-gate value in 2024 across 89 farms and 392.54 acres, with nearly 11.6 million oysters sold for consumption, and the picture is of an industry built entirely on the assumption that the ocean off New England stays productive.
No official model has estimated how a Virginia dredging operation would affect those landings, or the state's seafood businesses, or the whales that draw tourists to the coast. The question CLF is raising is whether the federal government will produce such an analysis before, rather than after, the leases are signed.
The Virginia process is not the only front. NOAA, exercising its authority under the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, has been rewriting its rules for exploration licenses and commercial-recovery permits in international waters – a final rule revising the application and public-comment process took effect January 21 – and its current docket lists several pending applications, including a consolidated application from The Metals Company USA seeking both an exploration license and a commercial-recovery permit, with public comment open through October 19. The United States is not a party to the Law of the Sea Convention, which means it does not answer to the International Seabed Authority that regulates deep-seabed mining for the countries that are.
And in the Pacific, the administration has moved further still. On July 17, BOEM published a proposed leasing notice for a mineral lease sale offshore American Samoa, proposing to hold the sale on November 19 – which would make it the first deep-sea mining lease sale in U.S. waters. On August 18, two community groups, Fa'asao Amerika Samoa and the Conservation Council for Hawai'i, represented by Earthjustice, filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii under the Administrative Procedure Act. The complaint challenges the National Marine Fisheries Service's conclusion that the American Samoa project was "not likely to adversely affect" species protected under the Endangered Species Act, and argues federal agencies failed to properly evaluate effects on endangered species and on cultural and subsistence resources.
That case is about American Samoa, not Virginia, and it will not decide the Atlantic proposal. But it is the first courtroom test of how much scrutiny the administration's expedited seabed-mining reviews can withstand – and the standard it sets for what "not likely to adversely affect" is allowed to mean will follow the industry up the East Coast.
Taken together, the executive order, the NOAA rule change, the American Samoa sale and the Virginia request describe a single pattern: a federal government methodically constructing, piece by piece, the legal architecture for a seabed-mining industry that has never operated at commercial scale anywhere on the planet, while assuring the public at each step that nothing has actually been decided.
BOEM is now deciding whether to move the Virginia proposal from information gathering into formal area identification and environmental review. The American Samoa sale is scheduled for November 19. NOAA takes comment on The Metals Company's application until October 19. And the administration's stated standard for all of it remains the language of the executive order that started the process – "streamlined permitting without compromising environmental and transparency standards."
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