3.8 years. That is the average time it now takes for a resource project to receive environmental approval under the EPBC Act, according to the Minerals Council of Australia. In 2019, the average was 2.3 years. A 60% increase in decision times, during a period when the number of projects entering the approvals pipeline has accelerated sharply on the back of critical minerals demand, record gold prices, and renewed exploration capital.
The financial cost of that delay is well documented: the MCA estimates a 12-month delay across the new mining project pipeline costs $51 billion in cumulative GDP. Multiple mining projects, more than 5,000 km of transmission lines, and 26,000 homes are caught in the current approvals backlog. That capital cost is regularly cited in policy submissions and industry commentary.
What receives less attention is the workforce cost, and it may be the more consequential one for small-to-mid cap ASX explorers planning field programs in 2026.
The stop-start workforce cycle
A drill program that secures funding and begins assembling a field team cannot hold experienced contract geologists on standby for 3.8 years while an approval works its way through the system. Field teams get released. Those geologists take other contracts, often within weeks. Core handlers, field technicians, drilling supervisors: they move to programs that are ready to deploy. When the approval finally lands, the explorer does not resume with the same team. They start the recruitment process again.
In a market where over 430 major resource and energy projects are under development with approximately $62 billion in committed investment, that recruitment restart is not a simple exercise. Time-to-hire for senior technical roles is increasing as candidate pools narrow. The industry requires an additional 22,000 production-related workers by 2030. Each assemble-release-reassemble cycle costs time, money, and program continuity that does not appear on any balance sheet as a line item.
The knowledge loss compounds the financial cost. A geologist who logged core in the first phase of a program and understands the geology at depth, who knows where the contacts shift and what the alteration signature looks like at 200 metres, is not interchangeable with a replacement who arrives 18 months later with no site history. The ramp-up time is real, the geological context needs rebuilding, and the cost of that lost continuity is paid in program efficiency for months.
The demand-side pressure
ASX-listed explorers entered 2026 with $12.04 billion in combined cash reserves, the highest figure since BDO began tracking the sector in 2013. Exploration expenditure hit $915.65 million in the December 2025 quarter. Capital is flowing into gold, lithium, rare earths, copper-gold, and antimony projects simultaneously.
The workforce is already stretched by programs that have secured approvals and are drilling now. Regulatory delay adds another layer: it creates a rolling backlog of projects that will need field teams when their approvals eventually land, and those approvals do not arrive on a predictable schedule. The result is demand surges that are difficult to anticipate and field team requests that cluster around approval outcomes rather than spreading evenly across the calendar.
What reform looks like and what it does not solve
The MCA has proposed a $13 million AI pilot program to streamline EPBC assessments, partnering with Amazon Web Services to trial AI-supported document review, pre-submission quality checks, geospatial data integration, and risk comparison tools. The newly established Federal Environment Protection Authority is expected to bring structural changes to the approvals process. The May 2026 federal budget may signal the government's appetite for meaningful acceleration.
These reforms, if they deliver faster and more predictable timelines, would reduce the workforce churn problem at its source. But reforms take time to implement, and the pipeline of funded projects waiting for approvals is large now. The workforce planning problem exists today regardless of what the regulatory timeline looks like in 2028.
What the best-positioned companies are doing differently
The exploration companies managing this most effectively are treating regulatory uncertainty as a workforce planning variable rather than an external event that happens independently of their recruitment timeline. In practice, that means scoping field team requirements 6-12 months before anticipated approval rather than after. It means maintaining relationships with experienced contractors between deployments so the reassembly is faster when an approval lands. And it means building contingency into program budgets for the recruitment and ramp-up costs that a delayed approval creates.
At Norwest Exploration and Mining Services, we specialise in rapid deployment of experienced geologists and field technicians into exploration programs across Australia. Whether you are assembling a new field team or rebuilding one after a regulatory delay, we place the right people fast.
The companies that build approval timelines into their workforce strategy will keep their teams intact. The ones that treat approvals and recruitment as separate problems will assemble the same field crew twice and pay for it both times.