Mining Due Diligence in Chile: The Permitting File Is the Asset

The question buyers don't ask

A data room for a Chilean mining asset will tell you, in order: what the geology looks like, what the resource statement says, who audited it, what the capital cost is, and what the offtake terms are.

It will also contain a folder, usually near the bottom, holding the environmental resolution, some sectoral permits, a closure plan and a set of water titles.

Almost every buyer treats the first list as the asset and the second as the paperwork.

That is backwards, and it is the most expensive mistake in mining due diligence in Chile.

From the regulator's side of the desk, the permitting file is the only part of the package that tells you what the project is actually allowed to do, how long it took to get there, what it promised in order to get there, and what happens to those promises when the name on the title changes. The resource is a statement about rock. The file is a statement about rights — and in Chile the rights are what carry the risk.

Here is how to read it.

First: there are two tracks, not one

The single most common misreading of Chilean permitting is treating it as one queue. It is two, running in sequence, governed by different bodies, on different clocks.

Read the bottom row twice, because it governs everything else.

The reform everyone in the market is talking about touched the second track and deliberately left the first alone. If your target is on the EIA track — and most large copper and lithium projects are — the reform does not move your date. It moves what happens after your date.

For how the environmental track behaves in practice, and where projects actually lose years inside it, see our piece on the main bottlenecks in environmental permitting.

Second: know exactly when the new system arrives

Law 21,770, published in September 2025, is a genuine improvement to the sectoral track. It allows permits that used to queue to run in parallel. It replaces prior approval with a notice or sworn declaration plus ex-post oversight for low-risk authorisations. It creates SUPER, a single digital window, and a dedicated Office and Committee for sectoral authorisations.

It is also not live yet — and the timetable is now public and precise. DFL No. 2 of the Ministry of Economy, published on 10 February 2026, sets the phased adoption of the SUPER platform:

A mining project needs permits from both groups. They arrive a full year apart.

Two practical consequences for due diligence:

• Ask the target which of its outstanding permits sit with Group B bodies. That subset is not getting faster before 2028.
• Treat the alternative techniques with care. A sworn declaration moves risk, it does not remove it. A declaration that turns out to be wrong can cost the site, not just a fine — and the whole mechanism depends on the State funding the ex-post inspection it has now promised.

Third: the four files that decide the deal

Below the headline permits sit four files that a buyer inherits whole. In my experience these, not the RCA itself, are where transactions get repriced — and they are where due diligence in Chile earns its fee.

1. The RCA and what was promised to obtain it

An RCA is not a licence to operate as described in the technical report. It is a licence to operate subject to every commitment made during the assessment — including commitments offered voluntarily to close gaps in the file, which are as binding as the ones imposed.

What to pull: the RCA itself, the ICSARA rounds and the responses to them, and the consolidated commitment schedule. Read the responses, not the summary. The number of clarification rounds tells you how contested the file was, and a heavily contested file usually means heavily specific commitments.

What to ask: which commitments have ongoing monitoring obligations, which have been the subject of sanction proceedings before the environmental enforcement authority, and whether any modification of the project would require a new entry into the SEIA. That last question kills more expansion cases than geology does.

2. Water

Chile reformed its Water Code in 2022 through Law 21,435, and the reform reaches backwards, which is what catches buyers out.

• New consumptive rights are granted for a maximum of 30 years, renewable, rather than in perpetuity.
• Rights are extinguished for non-use. The clock runs from first inclusion in the non-use registries, from January 2023, with five years for consumptive rights and ten for non-consumptive ones.
• Human consumption and sanitation now take priority over productive uses, both in granting new rights and in restricting the exercise of existing ones.
• Rights constituted before the reform had an eighteen-month window from April 2022 to be registered with the property registrar.

That last point is the due diligence item. The deadline has passed. A right that was never properly inscribed is not a defect you can cure at closing; it is a question about whether the right still exists. Pull the registrar's certificate for every title, check the inscription date against the deadline, and check every right against the non-use registries.

For projects where water is the binding constraint rather than an input — which is most of them north of Copiapó — this file deserves more hours than the resource statement.

3. Closure

Under Law 20,551, any operation extracting more than 10,000 tonnes per month of raw material needs an approved closure plan and a financial guarantee. The guarantee is calculated from the present value of the full cost of closure plus post-closure monitoring, and it must be fully constituted within two-thirds of the operation's life, or within fifteen years for longer-lived assets. Plans are audited every five years.

Closure plans are built on an assumed mine layout and an assumed life. Every expansion, every new waste facility, every extension of the pit changes the cost of closing and therefore the required guarantee. A plan approved six years ago against a mine that has since grown is an underfunded obligation, and the update lands on the buyer.

Ask for: the approved plan, every audit since approval, the current guarantee instrument and its valuation basis, and the gap between the closure cost as approved and the closure cost as the asset stands today. Then ask who pays to close that gap.

4. Concessions, and a bill that is moving right now

Chilean mining concessions are held by paying an annual patent. Fail to pay and the concession goes to auction. It sounds mechanical, and it is — which is exactly why it gets missed.

Two things make this live in 2026.

First, the volume. Concessions listed for auction for non-payment rose sharply through 2024 and 2025 — by roughly 45% for exploitation concessions and 75% for exploration ones against 2023, with the surface area involved up 63% and 99% respectively. Ground is being lost to an administrative failure, not a commercial decision.

Second, the law is being rewritten, and the timetable is tight. Bulletin 18,259-08 was filed in May 2026 and approved in general by the Senate on 9 September by 29 votes to 4, with the window for amendments closing on 28 September. It then returns to the Senate mining committee for detailed study. As drafted, it would scrap the progressive patent scale introduced by Law 21,420 — which climbs from 0.4 to as much as 12 UTM per hectare with the age of the concession — and replace it with two flat rates: 0.1 UTM per hectare where work on the concession is demonstrated, and 0.4 UTM where it is not. The committee chair has signalled that the detailed stage will look at further support for small-scale mining, so the rates are not settled and the final text may not be the one described here.

For a buyer this cuts both ways. If your target holds aged exploration ground it has been carrying at a punitive rate, the bill materially changes the cost of holding it — and the value of the option. If your target has been letting marginal concessions lapse to manage that cost, you are buying a smaller land package than the presentation implies. Pull the patent payment history for every concession, not a sample, and check the auction lists.

What a thin file looks like from the other side

I read applications for years. The pattern that predicted failure was never technical weakness. It was asymmetry: a flawless engineering package attached to a thin consultation record.

That combination does not read as rigour to the person deciding. It reads as risk — because the official signing knows that the part of the file most likely to be challenged in court is the part the applicant treated as a formality.

The same asymmetry is visible in a data room, and it should be priced the same way. A target with a fast RCA and a thin community record has not been efficient. It has deferred a cost.

The honest timeline

For an EIA-track project in Chile today:

• 1–2 years of seasonal baseline studies before you file
• 2–4 years of environmental evaluation, unchanged by the 2025 reform
• Sectoral permitting after the RCA, faster over time as SUPER arrives — nationally from the end of 2026, regionally from the end of 2027

Law 21,770 improves the third of those three. It is real, it now has dates attached, and it is not a schedule discount you can book today.

What you can do today is read the file properly — and decide what to pay for a project on the basis of the rights it actually holds, rather than the rock it sits on.

Sources: Law 21,770 and DFL No. 2 of the Ministry of Economy (10 Feb 2026); Law 21,435 amending the Water Code; Law 20,551 on mine closure; Law 21,420; Bulletin 18,259-08, before the Senate. This article is general information, not legal advice.