Electric utility executives planning long-term battery energy storage system (BESS) deployments face a persistent supply chain vulnerability: extreme market concentration in battery-grade nickel, cobalt, and manganese refining.
A major regulatory development at NOAA last week highlights how far Washington is willing to go to bypass those bottlenecks. By invoking a dormant 1980 statute, federal regulators are reviewing commercial applications to harvest 1.6 billion metric tons of polymetallic nodules from the deep Pacific floor—enough raw material to transform Western battery supply chains.
While the move faces international legal challenges from the ISA and environmental resistance, the energy sector should pay close attention to the financial mechanism. If federal defense stockpiling and off-take guarantees de-risk seabed mineral processing, it could eventually stabilize cathode raw material costs for large-scale grid storage deployment. This story appeared in Forbes and Yahoo Finance. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/08/24/americas-unilateral-bid-for-deep-ocean-minerals-met-with-contempt/