Navigating smoother, faster approvals pathways – through early engagement and integrated expertise

As regulatory requirements, technical standards, and stakeholder expectations for the mining sector have strengthened, the path to securing approval for a mining project has become less linear and more complex. Greater detail is required regarding every project’s potential environmental and social impacts, such as impacts on groundwater, biodiversity, visual and other amenities and cultural heritage impacts.

The most important investment in a smoother approval pathway is early engagement and collaboration with key stakeholders, including those responsible for making decisions and potentially impacted communities, particularly Traditional Owner groups. Through early engagement, a project team can build a robust understanding of potential impacts and risks surrounding the project and develop a program to support full and proper assessment.

Early engagement helps to identify opportunities to sufficiently address, manage and mitigate the social, economic and environmental impacts in ways that are more likely to be accepted by community and other stakeholders.

Collaboration also leads to better understanding of the project goals and constraints and, when integrated with engineering and project planning, it supports better design solutions. For example, investigating greenhouse gas requirements and planning for mine closure from the beginning of a project may support solutions to reduce carbon or create greater value from sequencing closure activities.

Having the right specialists on board from concept stages through to detailed design and delivery is the key to smoother and more streamlined approvals processes. Mining companies will benefit from including specialists in their project development team who can navigate the complexities of State and Commonwealth legislation and guidelines, coordinate specialist environmental and social studies, and manage regulator expectations to achieve project approvals with appropriate consent conditions.

The volume of project approvals now in the pipeline puts all stakeholders under pressure to progress approvals more effectively. For mining companies, delays in the approvals process can compress timelines in later stages. Project teams are exploring how to achieve greater agility and control in the approvals phase to keep projects on track and move to construction and operations efficiently and safely.

Unlocking the skills and capacity to deliver major projects

As the demand for mining projects continues to surge, finding and retaining skilled workers is becoming increasingly challenging, impeding project delivery as well as operational efficiency.

This challenge is intertwined with the renewable energy transition, with the International Energy Agency estimating that the critical minerals market will need to expand by two to seven times by 2030 to meet the minerals demand of renewable energy and storage technologies. Achieving this major uplift in mining will need a legion of skilled workers – but the renewable energy sector itself is equally hungry for skilled professionals including engineers, technicians, project managers, and researchers.

In addition to the broader project design and engineering services, skills are also needed in transmission and distribution, power networks, substations and cable engineering. Other skillsets are needed in electrical infrastructure and control and instrumentation for power generation on brownfield and greenfield sites.

Then there are new skills gaps appearing for emerging technologies – such as digital twins, AI, analytics, visualisation tools and GIS mapping.

Addressing these gaps requires the industry to prioritise upskilling and reskilling the existing workforce, as well as attracting new talent and addressing gaps in training and education. Ongoing professional development and support for growing and expanding current skillsets will go some of the way to addressing this growing demand.

Leveraging offshore resources may also contribute to meeting the skills gap and could help Australia benefit from overseas project experience. Another consideration is exploring the extent to which AI may be able to optimise workforce deployment and improve decision-making in both the mining and renewable energy sectors.

Collaboration will be critical

Governments, industry and education providers have significant roles to collaborate and coordinate towards the common goals of developing the infrastructure needed to achieve the energy transition. As the pipeline of major infrastructure projects rolls out – whether the projects are mining, renewables, transmission, transport or water – it will be increasingly important for businesses to coordinate across nearby projects to make the most of the potential synergies.

Government can play an important role in improving approvals systems and processes by ensuring that these are well resourced and adequately staffed with the right skill sets to manage larger case loads.

Addressing the labour and skills shortage will require long-term strategies and a collaborative effort from proponents, government, industry bodies and educational institutions. Solving these challenges could unlock long-term competitive advantages and greater sustainability for mining and renewables – strengthening the businesses that will shape a Future Ready^TM Australia and the path to net zero.

For more insights and discussion about one of the key challenges we’ve explored in this article, you can register to view this AusIMM webinar recording delivered on 25 October with WSP's Charlie Wilson-Clark and Josh Matthews: Navigating approval pathways in mining (ausimm.com)

Accessing the webinar is free for AusIMM members or $33 for non-members.