The government is eyeing to shorten to one to two years the permitting process in mining.
“The goal here is to shorten the permitting process from what people believe now is five to six years to two to three years in the words of the good Secretary (Ma. Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources). But of course, we’re hoping she can even shorten that to one to two years,” said
Secretary Frederick Go, Special Assistant to the President for Investment and Economic Affairs, said at the Philippine Economic Briefing yesterday.
He said instead of making the permitting process in mining sequential, it should be simultaneous to shorten the timeline.
He said there is a need to move up the value chain in the mineral process instead of just focusing on the exploration
This can be done by attracting investments in the downstream process.
“The most obvious for us would be the downstream processing of nickel and copper because we are now the largest exporter of raw nickel ore to the world and we supposedly have the largest copper deposit mine here in the Philippines. And this can increase the value of our exports by perhaps 10 times,” Go said.
He said Indonesia went from exporting $3 billion of raw nickel ore a year to now about $30 billion worth of processed nickel.
“In a perfect world, the dream is that batteries that go to electric vehicles are to be processed here. So of course, processing electric vehicles in the Philippines will be our end goal, and we have to start somewhere and that somewhere starts with streamlining the processing of mineral exploration permits,” Go said.
