The Slowest Things in the Ground

The critical minerals the West is racing to onshore are the slowest things in the ground to build.

Pulse holds the dated milestone history for 835 projects that have reached a definitive feasibility study — maiden resource to DFS, every date linked back to its filing.

Run the clock by commodity and a pattern falls out.

Uranium takes a median of 8.2 years from maiden resource to a definitive study. Rare earths, 5.6. Copper, 5.4. Nickel, 5.3.

Now the other end of the table. Iron ore, 2.3 years. Coal, 2.2.

The commodities the energy transition and Western supply-chain policy lean on most sit at the slow end. The bulk commodities nobody is writing strategy papers about move nearly four times faster.

Then there's where you build.

Among the same projects, the United States is the slowest developed jurisdiction to reach a definitive study, at a median of 6.1 years. Australia does it in 3.8. Brazil in 2.4.

So the policy ambition — build it here, build it now — runs into the longest study-and-permitting clock in the developed world, for exactly the minerals that take the longest anyway.

This doesn't argue against onshoring. The timeline is simply the reality capital allocators are pricing right now, whether they've measured it or not.

One honest qualifier: these are the projects that made it to a definitive study. The ones that stalled never enter the count. So read this as how long it takes when it works — not a promise that it will.

The data to ask this question has always existed. It just sat across a decade of filings, in JORC and NI 43-101 and S-K 1300, one project at a time. What's changed is that you can now ask it in one go.

Less searching. More strategising.™