Permitting a new copper mine means running a full environmental impact assessment: scoping, baseline biodiversity, water and hydrology, soil and air-quality studies, impact modelling, community consultation, a long regulatory review, mitigation design, permit-condition negotiation and final issuance -- eleven activities spanning years. Six discrete environmental and regulatory risks (review delays, community opposition, endangered-species findings, water contamination, permit-condition rework and site events) can each push issuance further out. Tamara runs the whole network as one 60,000-iteration Monte-Carlo, so every chart below is driven by the same model.
For a permitting programme, financing and project teams are held idle until the permit issues, so the single most valuable output is a defensible date: what is the probability the permit is issued by any given month?
The S-curve below converts 60,000 simulated issuance dates into a cumulative probability. The steep middle and long right tail are the signature of regulatory schedule risk: the plan can slip far more easily than it can be pulled forward.
The deterministic plan lands at 980 days, but the simulation puts the P50 at 1,227 days and the P90 at 1,402, with a mean of 1,232. Only 2% of runs issue by the deterministic plan. The schedule contingency from plan to P80 is 361 days -- a full 11.9 months beyond the tidy plan.
The S-curve says how much the date can slip; the tornado says which activity is responsible. It ranks each activity by the Spearman correlation between its own duration and the permitting date across all 60,000 runs.
Regulatory submission & review dominates at 0.60 -- by a wide margin the single biggest lever, and on the critical path in 100% of runs. Community consultation (0.43) and baseline biodiversity studies (0.31) follow. Accelerating the regulatory interface buys more certainty than compressing any field study.
Turning the forecast into a reserve decision, the ladder reads each confidence level off the simulated issuance distribution: the extra days beyond the 980-day plan required to hit it.
Hitting P50 takes +247 days (issuance 1,227); P80 needs +361 days (1,341); and P90 demands +422 days (1,402), climbing to +470 days at P95. The jump from P80 to P95 is steep -- the cost of chasing the last increments of certainty rises sharply, which is exactly the trade-off a board should see before committing financing.
A permitting programme bleeds money while it waits -- held teams, consultants and financing. The before/after histogram shows total programme cost and the effect of mitigation.
Before mitigation the cost averages $23.8M with a P90 of $28.1M, and 24% of runs breach the $26M budget. Mitigation -- early stakeholder engagement, upfront biodiversity and water studies, and accelerated permitting resourcing -- pulls the mean to $21.9M, the P90 to $25.1M, and the probability of breaching budget from 24% down to 5%. The gap between the curves is the value of front-loading the studies, quantified.
Six discrete risks can each fire on top of activity-duration uncertainty. The Pareto ranks them by expected schedule impact -- probability times mean delay.
The top four of six risks carry roughly 80% of the expected discrete-risk delay. A regulatory review delay dominates at 7.9 weeks expected -- nearly double anything else -- with community opposition at 4.7 weeks, an endangered-species finding at 4.3 weeks and a water-scarcity / contamination issue at 3.7 weeks. The regulatory interface is both the top tornado driver and the top discrete risk, which makes it the unambiguous priority.
Tamara turns an eleven-activity EIA programme into a defensible permitting forecast. The S-curve gives a date and a contingency; the tornado and Pareto both point to the regulatory review as the dominant risk; the ladder sizes the reserve at each confidence level; and the cost chart prices the mitigation. Together they convert "about 980 days" into a quantified schedule-and-cost position a board can finance against.