You're overthinking it.
If they wanted to ask about hydrology etc because that was actually the issue in contention, they would have done so within a year or so. Sure, you can take a few months to pull your finger out of your arse and take a look at the application and then lose it behind the bar fridge for a couple more months until Jerko calls and politely asks what's going on, and then it might take months to get around to doing anything, but there's only so long you can stretch that out before you are either wantonly delaying for some strategic purpose (gee, whatever could that be?) or you genuinely have no desire to get it done.
They are waiting until they know AGY is willing *and* able to hand over their quote of brown paper bags. Hydrology questions wouldn't have taken years to be asked if that was the issue of concern.
Long ago when I was saying the 'delay' was going to last until we were in production and then magically we'd get the permit, the popular, high profile members here said I was a moron and we'd have it early last year (and they kept saying it would be imminent over the following year and they'd been saying it before that too). Those members won't admit to it now (and I won't do a Rob and search for their old posts, but they know who they are) but they believed the nonsense about it taking however long it was, but most now say it's because the government wants to know we're willing and able to deliver the brown paper bags.
Jerko presumably knows this but can't exactly state it in an announcement, or even that he expects the permit will be granted right when we need it. Jerko has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no respect for shareholders and apparently does not understand that they will be resentful or lose trust if he does not deliver on promises, so he was happy to spend years continually saying we'd have the permit tomorrow, expecting it to continually excite the market but never cause disappointing, resentment or distrust (same deal with other timeline promises).
The government also cannot say 'We're waiting for AGY to show us they can pay and commit to doing so', and because of the delay in issuing the permit they have to come up with some excuse because otherwise they have to pretend to be useless slackers.
If the answer was no, the government wouldn't have taken this long to say no - why would they? If the ostensible explanation of hydowhatever was genuine, it wouldn't have taken literally years to ask for it.
It's obviously no coincidence that the permit has taken an absurdly long time to issue and is just about ready with an excuse just around the time we happen to be about to achieve production, demonstrating we can do it and are wanting to commence construction of what the permit is for.
Don't look for complex explanations which don't make sense when the obvious explanation is in your face. The only reason some people don't accept the obvious explanation is that it's not the official one. If you think governments or people handing over brown paper bags are open and honest about everything, you need to immerse yourself in some reality. Using critical thinking and reading between the lines is going to serve you much better than faithfully believing in the honesty of politicians and bureaucrats.
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