The Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) has proposed a plan to deploy artificial intelligence to overhaul Australia’s sluggish environmental approval process, warning that current delays are costing the national economy billions of dollars.
MCA CEO Tania Constable called on the federal government to fund a AU$13 million, three-year pilot program. The initiative aims to embed AI into the decision-making framework of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, a move estimated to deliver long-term economic benefits of up to AU$1 billion.
The proposal comes as the resources sector grapples with an increase in approval timelines. Average decision times for resource projects have surged by 60 per cent in recent years, jumping from 2.3 years in 2019 to 3.8 years in 2025.
According to Constable, these bottlenecks are not just a headache for miners, they are a handbrake on Australia’s economy. Currently, the approvals backlog includes multiple mining projects, 5,000 kilometres of transmission lines, and roughly 26,000 homes.
“In mining alone, a 12-month delay across the new project pipeline is estimated to cost the Australian economy AU$51 billion in cumulative GDP, and bottlenecks are worsening as volumes of approvals driven by renewables and critical minerals projects continue to increase,” Constable said.
The pilot, which has secured the backing of Amazon Web Services, would introduce a suite of smart tools, including an interactive submissions coach for project proponents, a pre-submission quality check, geospatial data integration and tracking and a risk comparison capability.
The MCA argues that this isn’t about cutting corners, but about replacing inefficient manual document reviews with consistent, data-driven outcomes. The use of AI can also allow regulators to focus their efforts on the most complex and high-risk approvals.
The mining body noted that it wouldn’t be the first time AI was used to reduce approval delays. For example, New South Wales has an AI solution to review building permit applications as part of the State Significant Development process.
Meanwhile, in the mining-intensive Canadian province of British Columbia, Mining Digital Services built an AI-powered searchable library that extracts and verifies permit conditions from .pdf documents, reducing reliance on institutional knowledge and enabling faster compliance reporting.
