Too Late to Decide

A mine takes about sixteen years. Pick a year you want metal, and see when the decision had to be made.

This is a teaching toy, not research. It is arithmetic on calendar years — lay the stages of a mine end to end, put the last one's finish on your target, read off when the first had to start. There is no uncertainty, no chance of failure, no financing market, and no option to buy speed. The total is a published average; the split between stages is an apportionment made for this page, and each figure says which it is. No number here should be cited.

What this is showing

The lead time on new primary supply is long enough that it crosses from a planning problem into a historical one. S&P Global put the average at 15.7 years from discovery to production for mines that opened in the 2010s, and the IEA uses a comparable figure. Sixteen years is not a delay you manage. It is longer than most policy horizons, longer than most political terms, and longer than the interval between a target being announced and the year it falls due.

Which produces the result worth sitting with: for any target inside the next decade and a half, the decision is already behind us. A 2030 target needed work under way in 2014. A 2035 target needed 2019. Not "needs urgent action" — needed it, years ago, and the date does not move because the target is important.

Try it: drag the target year down toward the present and watch the required schedule slide backwards past the dashed line marking today. The shaded region is the part of the schedule that has already gone. Then push Permitting to its upper end — the single widest stage, and where most of the difference between two otherwise identical projects lives — and watch how much further back the start date goes.

None of which says the targets are wrong. It says that anything they need inside that window has to come from somewhere other than a new mine: recovery from what is already built, expansion of mines that already exist, substitution toward materials that are easier to get — or less demand. Those are the only doors left, and how much is needed in the first place depends heavily on which technologies get built.

What it leaves out

Almost everything that makes a mine hard. Projects fail, and most discoveries never become mines at all — the sixteen-year average is drawn from the ones that made it, which flatters it badly. There is no price signal here, and price is what actually starts and stops these projects. No community consent, no water, no tailings, no ore body that turns out worse than the drill core promised. Expansions of existing mines are faster than greenfield and are not modelled. Nor is the possibility that permitting reform genuinely shortens the middle of this chain.

Stage durations: src/scripts/leadTimeData.js, each labelled with its source. Model: src/scripts/leadTimeModel.js, about a hundred lines of calendar arithmetic and no dependencies. The total comes from S&P Global Market Intelligence; the stage split is an order-of-magnitude apportionment made for this page that sums to it.