Calibrated permitting-risk forecasts for North American mining

Every mining project waits on permits. Investors, project owners, lenders, and the lawyers around them all need the same three answers: how long, how uncertain, and what makes it worse. Kestrel Economics forecasts when mining permit applications will be decided, publishes each forecast before the decision, and grades it against the decision the regulator actually renders.

An editorial illustration: a vertical drill core rises from a wooded ridge and branches into a row of seven mining-derived outcomes at the top, evoking the forking paths of a permit decision.

What Kestrel publishes

Coverage

Permit-level forecasts

For every permit on your watchlist: how long it is likely to take, how wide the range around that is, and the named factors that could push it out. Updated as decisions, court rulings, and regime shifts land.

Calibration

Scored in public

Every forecast is checked against the decision the regulator actually rendered. Hits and misses both. The track record is what earns trust.

Analysis

Deep dives on the hard cases

When a case is genuinely contested (a court challenge, a regime shift, a novel test in the law), a single number would mislead. We publish a standalone treatment instead.

Why this exists

Mining permits are bets. Most are made on instinct.

Project owners decide when to deploy capital. Investors take positions. Lawyers estimate timelines. Lenders price risk. They are all betting on the same unknowns: how long the permit takes, how much that could vary, and what could push it out.

Today those bets get made based on experience, on the last anecdote, on what someone at the ministry said over coffee. Kestrel builds the substantive answer in public. Every forecast shows its baseline and the factors that widen it. Every decision gets scored against the forecast that pre-dated it. Wins and misses both.

Offerings

Two ways to use the forecast.

Subscription

Mining permit forecasting: weekly report.

Every week, a written read on what moved in mining permitting and what it means for the forecast on each project in coverage. The current watchlist, the decisions that landed, and the named factors that have widened or narrowed the range. Ontario first, expanding as coverage grows.

Analyst tool

Coming soon

Mining permit forecasting: analyst dashboard.

A working surface for analysts who use the forecast day to day. Track a custom set of permits, see the forecast and the named factors behind it, export plots into your own decks and memos, and get an email when something material changes. In development; opens once the weekly report has built a public track record worth working from.