A seabed mining company has asked the Trump administration for approval to harvest the ocean floor for critical metals in international waters controlled by a United Nations-affiliated organization

The Metals Company, or TMC, has “​​officially requested a pre-application consultation” with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and executives have also met with White House officials, the firm said Thursday in a statement.

A move by Trump’s White House to green light the company’s request for a mining license for the Pacific Ocean could upend an international treaty that governs deep-sea mining and other uses of the world’s oceans.

“This would be a very serious challenge to multilateralism and would threaten a free-for-all which would go far beyond deep-sea mining and have implications for freedom of navigation, maritime boundaries and fisheries management,” said Duncan Currie, an international lawyer and legal advisor to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, an alliance of more than 130 environmental groups and other nongovernmental organizations.

TMC “remains fully compliant with international law,” the company said in a separate statement.

Fifty-four percent of the global seabed is controlled by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a UN-affiliated body. TMC’s move threatens to disrupt more than a decade of negotiations to enact regulations that would allow mining to commence. Vancouver-based TMC holds two ISA licenses to prospect for cobalt, nickel and other metals found in polymetallic nodules — potato-sized rocks that cover the ocean floor by the billions from Hawaii to Mexico in an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. TMC and other ISA-licensed companies, however, can’t begin mining until regulations are enacted.

TMC previously said it would file an application for an ISA license this June to begin mining biodiverse deep-sea ecosystems regardless of whether regulations, including environmental protections, were in place. But on Thursday, the company ratcheted up that pressure by announcing it would seek US approval.

“This, frankly, has been a door that opened to us after the November election,” TMC Chief Financial Officer Craig Shesky said on an earnings call. “We believe that the United States is getting ready to retake its role as a leader in this industry, and to provide explicit support for the collection of polymetallic nodules.”

The ISA counts 169 nations and the European Union as members, though the US is not among them and has not ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which established the organization. That treaty reserved some mining areas in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone for the US in case it eventually acceded to the convention. The US in turn passed a 1980 law that laid out procedures for US companies to gain access to deep-sea minerals there. NOAA issued licenses to Lockheed Martin Corp. but the company never began mining.

TMC said it would seek US approval to mine in one of its ISA-licensed areas, where it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars. The license is sponsored by ISA member state Nauru, a tiny Pacific island nation. For the US to claim control over an ISA license area would be a clear-cut violation of the Law of the Sea Treaty, according to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition’s Currie.

“This is about what pathway can get us into commercial production the fastest way,” TMC Chief Executive Officer Gerard Barron said on the Thursday earnings call, as the explorer posted a full year loss of $81.9-million.

So far, 32 ISA member nations have called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining until its environmental impacts can be better understood.