North America’s push to reduce its dependence on China for critical minerals is running up against a problem that permitting reform alone cannot solve: it still takes years to determine whether many mining projects are technically and economically viable.
In the US, moving a mineral deposit from discovery through development and into commercial production can take more than 30 years, encompassing engineering, technical validation, financing and permitting.
National security and procurement objectives, by contrast, tend to operate on timelines measured in years rather than decades.
The engineering and technical studies required to move projects toward financing and construction represent an overlooked bottleneck in the race to establish domestic critical minerals supply chains.
Updated Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations (DFARS) requirements are set to take effect in January 2027, requiring materials used in certain defence applications to originate from non-aligned countries.
Effective January 1, the Department of War will enforce a ban on Chinese-origin rare earth magnets and constituent materials in all covered defense systems.
This timeline is unrealistic because current U.S. critical minerals production falls short, Dr. Ari Rostami, CEO of mining technology company AiMinr told MINING.com in an interview.
“With the current infrastructure that we have in place, the answer is no, unfortunately,” Rostami said when asked if US critical minerals production is aligned with the deadline.
The problem, he said, is a fundamental mismatch between the timelines driving national security policy and those governing mine development.
“The mine development, we are talking about generational clock,” Rostami said. “So these are two different clocks that they don’t really reconcile.”
China, he said, has built a far more accelerated and centrally coordinated system, while Western mining projects continue to move through fragmented and largely sequential development processes.
The risk is not simply that projects arrive late. Commodity markets and technology can change before a mine reaches production.
Rostami pointed to cobalt as an example. Expectations of rapidly growing cobalt demand from electric vehicles encouraged interest in new supply, but battery makers increasingly adopted alternatives including cobalt-free lithium-iron-phosphate chemistries.
“By the time our domestic mines come online, the technology they were supposed to be addressing, they may have already moved on, or we lost the market to the competition,” he said.
Beyond permitting
Efforts in the US and Canada to accelerate mine development have focused heavily on permitting, but Rostami said regulatory approvals tell only part of the story.
Rostami estimates that roughly 30% to 40% of the development timeline can be consumed by project studies and technical validation, beginning with preliminary economic assessments and scoping studies and advancing through prefeasibility, feasibility and detailed engineering.
“Just saying everything, kind of like blaming everything on the permitting and the government, I don’t think that’s the whole story,” he said.
The company he co-founded sees two structural problems with the conventional process.
The first is its dependence on labor-intensive engineering. Teams can spend months developing mine designs, schedules, processing flowsheets and cost estimates, even as the mining industry faces a shrinking pool of experienced technical workers.
The second is that studies are typically completed through linear, siloed workflows.
Geologists pass information to mine planners, who pass designs to processing engineers and ultimately financial teams. If an important assumption changes, the consequences can ripple through the entire study and force teams to redo substantial amounts of work.
“Any changes in the baseline of one of these disciplines’ assumptions, it will equate to redoing… weeks and maybe sometimes years of work from scratch,” Rostami said.
The result can be what he calls “study fatigue,” with greenfield projects caught in repeated rounds of technical work while developers simultaneously try to secure financing.
“This is not a geology problem,” he said. “It’s actually not a regulatory problem. It’s a problem with the process in which we validate these assets on the engineering side.”
Digital general contractor
AiMinr is attempting to attack that problem with a software platform designed specifically for mining capital projects.
The company began developing the system in late 2021, with the goal of accelerating studies including PEA, prefeasibility and feasibility work. It now offers the platform as cloud-based software to mining companies, consultancies and investors.
At its core is what AiMinr calls an “orchestrated engine,” which Rostami describes as a digital general contractor for major mining projects.
Rather than treating geology, geotechnical engineering, hydrology, ventilation, metallurgy and financial modelling as isolated disciplines, the platform connects them through more than 50 specialized AI agents managed by a central orchestrator.
“You’re taking this from the sequential exercise and siloed environment into parallel, all connected, unified ecosystem,” he said.
That allows changes to project assumptions to propagate through multiple disciplines.
A change in commodity prices or mine design, for example, can trigger corresponding updates to mine plans, processing assumptions and financial models rather than requiring teams to manually rebuild each component.
“Everything is connected and all happening in one platform, one flow,” Rostami said.
AiMinr also uses agents to automate elements of planning, scheduling, cost estimation and process-flow design.
Rostami said the approach has the potential to compress engineering work that can currently stretch over a decade into a matter of years — and potentially months for some parts of the process.
AI without the ‘black box’
Convincing mining companies to trust artificial intelligence with engineering decisions remains another hurdle.
AiMinr is attempting to address that by separating its AI orchestration layer from the underlying calculation engine.
Rather than asking generative AI to produce engineering numbers, Ariel said the agents manage deterministic algorithms used for processes such as mass balances and mine planning.
“We are not relying on the generative AI to guess or generate anything,” he said.
That architecture is intended to make results traceable and allow them to be cross-validated against project inputs and operating data.
Mining companies have historically been cautious adopters of new technology, but Ariel said attitudes toward AI are changing, particularly among executives and major producers.
The challenge now is that companies often know they want to deploy AI without necessarily understanding where or how it should be applied.
“They basically see the power of AI, they want to utilize the AI,” he said. “The problem is no one really can define what AI actually is.”
AiMinr is already working with major mining companies and said one client at a brownfield operation in Alaska is using its technology to overhaul short- and long-term planning, resource and reserve estimation and mine planning, according to Rostami.
He expects adoption to spread from corporate offices into mine operations as companies become more comfortable with the technologies, adding that this should not be confused with consumer-facing generative AI tools.
“It’s not GPT, it’s not Gemini, it’s not going to generate text,” he said. “The AI we were talking about is a completely different architecture, and it has a completely different use case within the engineering.”
For Western governments trying to build critical mineral supply chains on national-security timelines, that distinction could become increasingly important.
Permitting reform may remove one obstacle to getting mines built faster. AiMinr’s argument is that speeding up the engineering work needed to determine which projects should be built in the first place could be just as critical.
Source: https://www.mining.com/critical-minerals-security-collides-with-decades-long-mine-timelines/
