Stalled at SEMARNAT: What Firms Filing Applications Recommend

Permitting throughput, not geological endowment, is now the binding constraint on Mexico's participation in North American critical mineral supply chains, with 176 projects inherited as stalled in October 2024, exploration spending down from US$500 million in 2023 to a projected US$400 million in 2025, and roughly US$4 billion in investment awaiting environmental authorization. Mexico's multi-agency permit architecture spans SEMARNAT, CONAGUA, SEDENA, agrarian consultation and land access, each capable of suspending a project independently. Mining operators, exploration companies and investors face a market that now prices administrative readiness as heavily as orebody quality.

Mexico ranks among the world's Top 15 producers in 19 minerals, 12 of them classified as critical by Washington, and holds development potential in at least 13 sought-after critical minerals including lithium, copper, graphite, rare earths, antimony and fluorite. Despite the significant geological potential, the country does not have a permitting system fast enough to convert any of that into supply, and permitting, according to the lawyers watching the West scramble to reduce its dependence on China, is the variable that now decides the contest.

That argument was made this week by Scot Anderson, Managing Partner, Womble Bond Dickinson, who spends his working life on the paperwork side of mining. Speaking to MINING.COM, the Denver-based lawyer said the binding constraint on building an alternative supply chain is not geology, capital or technology, but how long it takes to get a permit. The diagnosis was aimed at the United States. It describes Mexico at least as well.

His starting point is the G7 framework agreed in June, which set a ceiling of 60% on any single supplier's share of members' rare earth imports by 2030. What Anderson praised was its scope: the plan treats extraction as one link rather than the whole chain, budgeting for processing capacity, transport infrastructure, and regulatory throughput alongside the mines. Getting a mineral out of the ground is the easy part; getting it into a market is the problem.

The scale of the gap justifies the framing. China extracts roughly 69% of the world's rare earths and refines more than 90% of them, with a grip exceeding 70% of refining capacity across critical minerals generally. Further down the chain the concentration tightens further, with Beijing holding around 85% of cathode production and 85% of lithium battery cell manufacturing. Anderson's conclusion is that buying from China will remain unavoidable in the near term and probably in the long term too, whatever the diversification targets say. Beijing underlined the point within days of the G7 announcement by placing US rare earth producers under export controls.

A Benchmark Worth Borrowing

Anderson's specific complaint concerns US permitting, where understaffed agencies, thin technical capacity and litigation under the National Environmental Policy Act routinely stretch approvals across a decade or more. His position is that this is a false trade-off. Six weeks would be too fast to conduct a serious review; twenty years does not make the review better, only later. He points to Chile, where permits are typically resolved in about three years, and suggests a three-to-five-year window is ample for a rigorous process. The corollary is procedural: engage regulators and neighboring communities before the dispute reaches a courtroom, because explaining a project early is cheaper than defending it later.

While the US bottleneck is largely a single statute administered slowly, Mexico's is architectural. A project must clear environmental impact authorization from SEMARNAT, water concessions from CONAGUA, land-use approval in forested areas, explosives permits from SEDENA, Indigenous consultation obligations, and access agreements with ejidos or private landowners, each with its own timeline and its own capacity to suspend everything else. 

Fernando Aboitiz, Head of the Extractive Activities Coordination Unit at the Ministry of Economy, has described the 176 stalled projects the administration inherited in October 2024 as a coordination failure rather than a technical one.

The clearing effort has produced results. Of those 176 files, 110 had been resolved by early 2026, leaving 66 outstanding, with normalization targeted for mid-year. The industry's own count tells a slower story: Del Pozo Mendoza put the number of stalled projects at 160 at the International Mining Conference in Chihuahua, with roughly 60% approved and the rest scattered across every stage of review, and identified missing environmental permits as the primary obstacle to some US$4 billion in investment. His argument mirrors Anderson's: geology is favorable. Yet, exploration is expensive and long-horizon, and every day of delay transfers capital to another jurisdiction.

Capital has already been moving. Mineral exploration spending in Mexico slid from more than US$500 million in 2023 to a projected US$400 million in 2025, while total mining investment grew only 2.1% in 2024, to US$5.063 billion, as new permits and concessions lagged. CAMIMEX counts 574 projects across 30 states, 126 in Sonora, 67 in Chihuahua, 59 in Durango, split almost evenly between exploration and production, with 85 on hold.

Enforcement as Policy

Regulatory direction compounds the timing problem. The 2023 reform to the Federal Mining Law cut concession terms from 50 years to 30, introduced public tenders, tightened environmental and social requirements and formalized grounds for cancellation. Enforcement followed: more than 1,200 concessions were recovered in February 2026 over fiscal or reporting non-compliance, 713 of them inside protected areas.

The market response has been to price the paperwork. Operators with fully permitted assets now enjoy what executives describe as a permit moat, an advantage over exploration-stage competitors that has less to do with orebody quality than with administrative position. That is the clearest possible signal that the constraint Anderson identified is binding.

Some of the institutional groundwork is being laid. Water management has been elevated within SEMARNAT under new legislation, a national forestry plan has raised environmental commitments, and FIFOMI has been revived as a financing vehicle for supply chain development, drawing interest from Canadian companies. Minister of Economy Marcelo Ebrard has committed to compressing approval times and reviving large-scale exploration in 2026, though industry veterans have noted that ministerial commitments to mining have been reversed before.

The Rare Earths Exclusion

One category sits outside the permitting debate entirely. Rare earth exploration remains reserved to the state, closed to private and foreign participation, and Raúl García, President, College of Mining Engineers, Metallurgists and Geologists of Mexico, has warned that without reform the country will import minerals it could be producing. Lithium follows the same logic: the Supreme Court upheld the 2022 nationalization, and PEMEX is now exploring extraction from oilfield brines across five states, with the regulator operating on a budget of roughly US$805,000.

What Operators Can Actually Do

Lawyers working these files daily have converged on a consistent set of recommendations, and none of them involve waiting for reform.

The starting point, according to Joel González, Senior Partner, ALN Abogados, is recognizing that permitting has stopped being a checklist exercise. In interviews with MBN, he has described five pillars now organizing federal mining policy, water, forestry, education, financing and responsible protocols, and argued that the past 18 months have brought a real opening to dialogue with the Ministry of Economy and SEMARNAT. Companies that arrive with documentation aligned to those pillars are meeting a receptive counterpart; companies that arrive with a permit application are not.

Three practical implications follow:

Refile against current criteria. González has flagged that SEMARNAT is now assessing submissions against updated water regulations and forestry standards even when the file was lodged years earlier. Operators sitting on aging applications should assume the standard has moved and update the technical annexes proactively rather than waiting for a request for information that restarts the clock.

Build interdisciplinary teams, not legal departments. González's assessment is that projects treating permitting as one department's responsibility consistently stall, while those staffed with genuine environmental, hydrological, agrarian and community expertise keep regulatory momentum. The same logic explains why government relations has become a dedicated executive function at companies advancing large projects, and why due diligence in mining M&A now requires interdisciplinary review of concession status alongside environmental and social liabilities.

Document community support as evidence, not goodwill. The 2023 Mining Law requires consultation with Indigenous and agrarian communities before a concession is granted, running in parallel with the consultation attached to the environmental impact assessment. González's guidance is that community backing must be documented and filed as part of the application, because the volume of evidence directly strengthens a company's position with the authorities. Starcore's agreement with the El Doctor community in Queretaro, which secured social license for the La Tortilla project, is the working template, and it required navigating agrarian law governing ejidos and agrarian communities, a distinct legal regime from public or private property.

Fernando Aboitiz has made the official version of the same point: much of the administrative paralysis inherited by this government traced to the absence of structured mechanisms for community engagement and environmental review, rather than to opposition to mining as such. That framing matters, because it means the fix is available to individual companies rather than dependent on legislative change. It is also, almost word for word, Anderson's advice from Denver: get ahead of the community conversation and tell the project's story before someone else tells it in court.