The world wants the minerals but nobody has asked it about the mines
Governments have decided that minerals are strategic. The United States has designated critical minerals a national security priority, the European Union has its Critical Raw Materials Act, and Japan, Canada, Australia and the UK have all published strategies of their own. EY puts the investment needed to meet demand at 5.4 trillion dollars by 2035.
After a long stretch of being treated as a problem to be managed, the sector has the political conditions it spent years asking for.
Yet the public argument has barely started. Most people support what minerals make possible, from electric cars to a cleaner grid, without connecting it to the act of digging. One US study of 1,200 people found only 38 per cent were familiar with critical minerals, yet more than 80 per cent recognised that minerals matter to the energy transition. The distance between approving of the outcome and accepting the process is where the sector's next decade will be decided.
Three places where belief turns into cost
Belief gaps used to be reputational, something to manage around the annual report. In mining they have become an operational risk. EY’s survey of 500 senior mining leaders ranks licence to operate fifth among the sector's risks for 2026, and Mining Journal's latest Leadership Insights report found that half of industry professionals rate public trust in mining as low or very low. The industry knows the problem exists but has not yet treated it as a cost, and that cost shows up in three places.
The first is delivery. Rio Tinto's Jadar project sits on Europe's largest known lithium deposit and was designed to produce 58,000 tonnes of battery grade lithium carbonate a year against a billion dollar investment. The company committed to electric haul trucks, spoil heap restoration and mine water treatment, and the protests continued regardless until Serbia revoked the spatial plan and the project went on hold indefinitely. Technical answers arrived after the belief had already formed, which is generally too late for them to work.
Paying well does not settle it either. Cobre Panama was worth close to 5 per cent of Panama’s GDP and some 40,800 jobs when street protests and a Supreme Court ruling closed it in November 2023, and it has not reopened.
The second is people, and it is the least discussed. US mining engineering graduates have fallen by 39 per cent since 2016, and the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration expects more than 221,000 American mining workers, over half the domestic workforce, to retire by 2029. Canada faces a shortfall of 80,000 to 120,000 workers by 2030 and Chile needs another 34,000 by 2032. Seven in ten young people say they would not consider a career in mining, and nearly three quarters believe the industry does more harm than good.
The third is fiscal terms. Ghana is scrapping stability agreements and moving gold royalties from three to five per cent onto a sliding scale starting at nine, while Mali has raised state equity to 35 per cent. Measures of that kind are easier to introduce where the public already believes miners take more than they leave, and harder where it does not.
What the machines already say
The gap has also acquired a new gatekeeper. The question of whether mining is safe, worthwhile or a sensible career is increasingly put to an AI assistant rather than a teacher, a careers adviser or a local newspaper.
The answer is assembled from what the internet has said about mining over many years, a record dominated by tailings dam failures, cobalt supply chain investigations and campaign literature, rarely answered in the same register.
The industry's reply, from tighter tailings standards to site rehabilitation and the pay and technology in modern roles, sits in sustainability reports that few people read and carry little weight when a machine summarises the sector.
A student weighing up a geology degree, or a resident of the Jadar valley, may form a first impression from a chatbot shaped long before either of them asked.
The encouraging part is that the gap responds to information. When young people in Canada were shown what mining careers actually involve, including roles in technology, finance and business, 61 per cent said their view of the industry improved.
The same principle applies to machines. What AI assistants say about a sector can be tested, tracked and changed by publishing clear, well-sourced material that answers the questions people are actually asking. Doing so turns belief from something the industry complains about into something it can measure.
For the majors, and for the investors backing them, three things follow. Treat public belief as a delivery risk and measure it with the same discipline applied to grade or cost, in the capital as well as at the fence line. Tell the careers story to the people choosing careers now, in the places they actually look, rather than to each other at industry conferences. Find out what the machines are saying about the company in every jurisdiction where it holds a licence, and fill the gaps with evidence rather than slogans.
The world has made the case that it needs minerals. It now has to make the case that it needs mines, and to make it to the people who will live next to them, work in them and, increasingly, ask a machine about them first.
If you are thinking about what the regulators, the communities and the machines nearest your project currently believe, we would be happy to discuss how to measure it and start closing the gap.
Get in touch at info@wearespqr.com
