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Minerals Hub / Policy & Geopolitics / The 27-month permit clock and what it leaves out

Policy & Geopolitics · · 6 min read

The 27-month permit clock and what it leaves out

The EU's headline permitting deadline for strategic minerals projects is real, precise and narrower than it sounds — four provisions in the same article say what does not count towards it.

Pending review

A truck-mounted drill rig standing with its mast lowered and tarpaulin lashed over it on a cleared pad, grass coming through the ground around it.
Illustrative artwork: an idle drill rig of the kind held between permitted work programmes. Not a facility, equipment or material connected to this project. · Illustration · Osmond Hub

The short version

Regulation (EU) 2024/1252 — the Critical Raw Materials Act, a popular name the instrument never uses — puts a legal ceiling on the duration of the permit-granting process for a designated Strategic Project: 27 months for projects involving extraction, 15 months for projects involving only processing or recycling. Those numbers are exact and enforceable. They are also narrower than they read, and they are not the whole rule: four separate paragraphs of the same article exclude the developer's own environmental impact work, any period waiting for further information, and all appeals and judicial remedies; the clock does not start until an authority acknowledges the application is complete; and in exceptional cases the limits can be extended by up to six or three months.

The headline number

The provision is Article 11 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1252, headed "Duration of the permit-granting process". Its first paragraph provides that for Strategic Projects in the Union the permit-granting process shall not exceed "27 months for Strategic Projects involving extraction"(opens in a new tab) or "15 months for Strategic Projects involving only processing or recycling"(opens in a new tab). A recital is said to restate the same split in plainer words. It is neither quoted nor linked here: the preamble is the one part of this instrument the hub's verified retrieval does not reproduce, and Article 11(1) above already carries both figures in the enacting terms.

A second, shorter timetable is easy to miss, and it covers two cases: a project already in a permit-granting process before recognition, and an extension of a Strategic Project that has "already been granted a permit"(opens in a new tab). In both, the periods afterwards are 24 months for "Strategic Projects involving extraction"(opens in a new tab) and 12 months for "Strategic Projects involving only processing or recycling"(opens in a new tab).

When the clock starts

The start date is defined, and it is not the day the application arrives. Within 45 days of receiving an application, the single point of contact must acknowledge "that the application is complete or, if the project promoter has not sent all the information required to process an application, request the project promoter to submit a complete application without undue delay, specifying which information is missing"(opens in a new tab). And then, in the article's own words: the "date of the acknowledgement referred to in the first subparagraph shall serve as the start of the permit-granting process"(opens in a new tab).

A real discipline on the authority is attached to this. Where an application is deemed incomplete a second time, the single point of contact shall "not request information in areas not covered in the first request for additional information and shall be entitled only to request further evidence to complete the identified missing information"(opens in a new tab). That closes the oldest delay tactic in permitting — the sequence of new questions, each arriving after the last is answered.

What sits outside the clock

Three paragraphs remove periods from the count, and a fourth removes a whole category of proceedings.

The environmental impact assessment is split. Where an assessment is required under the EIA Directive, the step of the assessment "referred to in Article 1(2), point (g)(i), of that Directive shall not be included in the duration for permit-granting process"(opens in a new tab). Which step that is is settled by Directive 2011/92/EU, not here; that Directive was not retrieved for this article, so the step stays named as the Regulation names it. Article 11(8) then adds that the "period between the deadline for the submission of the environmental impact assessment report and the actual submission of that report shall not be counted"(opens in a new tab). And where consultation shows the report needs supplementing, the "period between the deadline for providing the additional information and the submission of that information shall not be counted"(opens in a new tab) either.

The fourth is the widest. The time limits are "without prejudice to obligations arising from Union and international law, and without prejudice to administrative appeal procedures and judicial remedies before a court or tribunal"(opens in a new tab).

A permitting deadline is a deadline for the administration. It is not a deadline for the project.

That reading is this hub's own, but it follows from the paragraphs rather than from any commentary on them. The elapsed time between a company deciding to seek a permit and holding one includes baseline studies, the assessment report, responses to consultation, and — in a contested case — litigation. Article 11 constrains the part of that sequence in which an authority is holding the file and deciding, and leaves the rest where it was. How large that part is in a real approval is an empirical question this document cannot answer, and nothing read here does.

The article also allows for the clock itself to be extended. In exceptional cases, where the nature, complexity, location or size of the project requires it, member states may extend the periods — but only "before their expiry and on a case-by-case basis"(opens in a new tab), so not after a limit has run, and not for a category at once — by a "maximum of six months"(opens in a new tab) for extraction projects and a "maximum of three months"(opens in a new tab) for the others, with the qualification that the single point of contact must then inform "the project promoter in writing of the reasons justifying the extension and of the deadline for the comprehensive decision"(opens in a new tab).

The office the clock runs through

A deadline needs somewhere to sit, and the same regulation builds it. By 24 February 2025, member states were to establish "or designate one or more authorities as single points of contact"(opens in a new tab). That body shall "be the sole point of contact for the project promoter and shall assist the project promoter in understanding any administrative matter relevant to the permit-granting process"(opens in a new tab).

One further obligation does quiet work: member states must ensure that any "valid studies carried out, or permits or authorisations issued, for a given critical raw material project are taken into account and that no duplicate studies, permits or authorisations are required, unless otherwise required under Union or national law"(opens in a new tab). That closing clause decides how much the provision does: the duty yields wherever another Union or national rule requires the duplicate. Where none does and the same hydrology would otherwise be assessed three times for three regimes, it is a provision whose value never shows up in a headline figure.

What it applies to

None of this is general permitting law. It attaches to projects the Commission has recognised as Strategic Projects — a discrete decision with its own application process.

The first list was adopted on 25 March 2025. The Commission announced that it had adopted, "for the first time, a list of 47 Strategic Projects to boost domestic strategic raw material capacities"(opens in a new tab), located across "13 EU Member States: Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Estonia, Czechia, Greece, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Poland and Romania"(opens in a new tab), with an "expected overall capital investment of €22.5 billion"(opens in a new tab) to become operational. Its own summary of the permitting benefit is the same two figures given above: the "permit-granting process will not exceed 27 months for extraction projects and 15 months for other projects"(opens in a new tab).

Whether those periods are being achieved is a separate question, and one this article cannot answer: no published data on actual permitting durations under Article 11 was found. The instrument is precise; its performance is not yet on the record.

Related

  • Investment Incentives — the financial instruments that sit alongside the
  • Regulation — the national permitting architecture the clock runs
  • Water — the environmental test a designation addresses in
  • Critical Mineral Strategies — the documents that bundle instruments like this

Sources

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