Not New Zealand. Not the USA. Not China. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown insists decisions about exploiting the Pacific archipelago’s enormously valuable critical minerals will be made in the long-term interests of the people of his small island nation.

His statement to Newsroom comes in response to Donald Trump’s nominee as US ambassador, Jared Novelly, who has fronted up to the Senate foreign foreign relations committee to put his case for confirmation. It’s believed he’s already been quietly approved by the New Zealand Government.

Novelly says if he’s confirmed as ambassador to New Zealand, Samoa, Niue and Cook Islands , he’ll expand American collaboration with local authorities to promote the responsible development of seabed mineral resources.

Cook Islands’ exclusive economic zone has just been expanded by 350,000 square kilometres to a massive 2.32 million sq km, after the United Nations approved its claim over the north-eastern Manihiki Plateau in November.

Not only does Cook Islands have a big exclusive marine area, but beneath it sits something called the Penrhyn Basin – which geologists believe is one of the world’s most lucrative treasure troves of titanium, tellurium, niobium, and rare earth elements like yttrium.

In particular, cobalt is valuable for its use in high-performance lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, mobile phones, and laptops. China is the world’s largest producer of refined cobalt, importing most of its raw ore from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Every single one of those minerals found in the Penrhyn Basin is on New Zealand’s newly released critical minerals list – and also on the United States list, updated in November.

Yet even as its exclusive economic zone has expanded, the Pacific archipelago’s population has been diminishing. It now has fewer than 13,000 residents on  236 sq km of atolls that remain above sea level, according to the United Nations population clock. Its immediate exclusive economic zone is now the 13th largest of any nation, working out at nearly 180 sq km of ocean per person – the equivalent of 18,000 rugby fields each.

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To champions of seabed mining in the Cook Islands government, this has the potential to turn them into the Pacific’s answer to Qatar or Brunei – small nations that have been made eye-wateringly wealthy by their mineral wealth.