Brazil wants to separate mineral research from mine licensing — and that changes the timeline for explorers

Lula signed the National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals with R$ 7 billion in incentives, while Brazil's Ministry of Mines and Energy finalizes a rule exempting the initial phase of mineral research from environmental licensing nationwide.

The Brazilian government advanced on two regulatory fronts for the mineral sector in September 2026. The first was the presidential signing, on September 16, of the National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals (PNMCE), which sets guidelines for exploration, processing, transformation and industrialization of these resources, authorizes R$ 7 billion in sector incentives, and creates the National Council for the Industrialization of Critical and Strategic Minerals (Cimce), tied to the Presidency, while also allowing the Mineral Activity Guarantee Fund to receive up to R$ 2 billion from the Union to reduce investment risk. The second, led by the Ministry of Mines and Energy, is a resolution in the final stage of review that would exempt the initial phase of mineral research — field prospecting, drilling and deposit analysis — from environmental licensing nationwide, without authorizing mining, extraction or processing. Brazil's National Mineral Policy Council had already approved, on July 2, a recommendation to classify this research, when conducted without a usage permit, as low environmental risk activity; the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change says it participated in drafting the proposal and stresses that other licenses and authorizations remain required.

The central point for anyone operating or planning exploration projects in Brazil is the separation of regimes: today, the environmental licensing requirement is often the same for drilling test holes on a site as for extracting ore from it, even though the two have environmental impacts of very different magnitudes. The proposal under review recognizes that gap and creates a lighter regime specifically for the stage when a company doesn't yet know whether an economically viable deposit exists — which cuts the time and cost of finding that out, without changing the requirements for when the answer is yes and the mine needs to move off the drawing board. The conditions attached to the exemption aren't trivial: no opening access roads or platforms at the research site, no clearing mid- or advanced-stage regenerating Atlantic Forest vegetation, no impact on natural caves and speleological heritage. That means the exemption favors low-physical-impact mineral research — drill holes, sampling — not any field activity whatsoever. The PNMCE, meanwhile, tackles another long-standing bottleneck in Brazil's mineral sector: the lack of a dedicated guarantee fund to reduce capital risk in early stages, when financing is scarcer and more expensive. A fund of up to R$ 2 billion doesn't solve that alone, but it signals the government is treating risk financing as part of the regulatory problem, not just a private-market issue.

Critical minerals — lithium, rare earths, nickel, copper for the energy transition — depend on discovering new deposits at a pace the traditional licensing regime, designed for mining and processing, wasn't built to accommodate. Separating research licensing from mine licensing is a regulatory architecture change, not a blanket loosening: it still requires licensing for everything that actually moves the needle on environmental impact — extraction, processing, clearing relevant vegetation — but it recognizes that drilling test holes on a site isn't the same as mining it. For exploration companies, this could mean months shaved off between deciding to investigate an area and having drilling results in hand. For anyone following mineral policy, it's a case study in how to design regulation proportional to the real risk of each stage of a project, instead of applying the same ruler to everything.