In April, a convention hall in Islamabad that was supposed to fill with mining executives was packed instead with the world’s press, covering peace talks that Pakistan had brokered.
The Pakistan Minerals Investment Forum (PMIF) had been booked into the Jinnah Convention Centre for April 8 and 9. Three days after the postponed event would have closed, US and Iranian delegations arrived in the capital for the first direct talks between the two countries in decades, and the convention centre became the media hub.
On November 12, the miners get the hall back. But they are returning to a different world.
In February, I wrote that conferences do not determine whether mining projects succeed. Institutions do. The question was not whether Pakistan’s deposits exist, but whether its institutions could deliver them. Ten days after that piece ran, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, and Iran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz. By mid-March, the forum had been postponed. By early April, Barrick had slowed development at Reko Diq.
The institutional question still stands. Almost everything around that question has moved.
A new picture
In June, closing out the Ground View Kazakhstan series, I compared reporting on frontier mining jurisdictions from a distance to putting together a jigsaw puzzle without seeing the full picture on the box. For Pakistan, all the pieces I laid out in February are still on the table. The challenge now is that the picture on the box has been redrawn, and three changes account for most of it.
The flagship slows
Reko Diq is one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper-gold deposits, with a planned mine life of about 37 years and first-phase output of roughly 200,000 tonnes of copper a year for a copper-hungry global market. Heading into February, the headlines about the project centred on major financing commitments. It seemed as though its development was at long last becoming a reality.
Nestled within Barrick’s fourth-quarter results on February 5, beneath headlines of record cash flow and plans to spin off its North American gold assets, was a single sentence noting that, “in light of a recent increase in security incidents,” management was “reviewing all aspects of the project.” Surrounded by that much good news, it read as diligence, a speed bump at most.
Then the region shifted. Within weeks of that release, war broke out in neighbouring Iran, whose border runs along Chagai district, home to Reko Diq. On April 2, the speed bump became a roadblock. Barrick said it would slow development and extend its review to mid-2027, citing “the further escalation of security issues in Pakistan and the region,” and warned of potentially significant increases to cost and timeline.
Phase 1 had been estimated at $5.6 to $6 billion, with first production by the end of 2028. Barrick says it still believes in the project’s long-term value, but offered few details on what triggered the view or what would end it. I hope to get more clarity on this at PMIF.
The pressure to develop Reko Diq is not shared equally between Barrick and its state partners. For Barrick, Reko Diq is one large asset in a global portfolio, and the February release made clear which part of that portfolio has its attention. For Pakistan, Reko Diq’s development is closer to a national balance-sheet question: decades of potential export earnings, royalties and taxes for a country that has long struggled with scarce foreign-exchange reserves. Pakistan’s finance minister stressed the cost of delay in a September meeting with the chairman of the US Export-Import Bank, which had approved $1.25 billion for the project.
The costs are not only economic. The Government of Balochistan holds a 25% stake in Reko Diq, and in a province where disputes over who benefits from its resources run deep, a stalled flagship is also a political problem.
The strait closes
Commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has been largely blocked since late February, apart from a short reprieve in June, and Brent crude is again above $100 a barrel. The damage to mining has not stopped at fuel. The International Energy Agency notes that about half of the world’s seaborne sulphur trade passes through the strait. Sulphur becomes sulphuric acid, which is used to process copper, lithium, nickel and rare earths. China curbed acid exports in May, and in some operations acid is now the largest single cost.
The Kazakhstan series was built on the argument that deposits alone do not make a supply chain. This year turned that from an analyst’s caveat into a front-page fact. One strait closed, and the cost, and even feasibility, of processing metal thousands of kilometres away substantially changed.
Pakistan’s coastline sits outside the Strait of Hormuz, on the open Arabian Sea. When I wrote about Balochistan last November, I noted that its deep-water ports, especially Gwadar, offered “rare access points beyond Hormuz.” This spring that became practical, as Gwadar began taking cargo diverted from routes through the strait. The same geography matters for Pakistan’s own minerals. Copper-gold concentrate from Reko Diq is set to travel 1,326 kilometres by rail from Chagai district to Port Qasim, near Karachi, for export. With a haul that long, the route to the sea may matter as much as the mine itself.
The room where it happened
The third change is the one the convention centre captured. In February, Islamabad was pitching itself as a highly attractive frontier mining jurisdiction. By April, it was the room where peace was being negotiated, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his senior officials brokering the talks. By June, the city’s name was on the Islamabad Memorandum. That ceasefire has since broken down, but Pakistan remains the channel both sides use.
That is diplomatic capital few frontier mining jurisdictions ever build. Last November, I argued that the competing attention of global powers gave Pakistan something rare: leverage. This year, it gained more of it than anyone could have planned. Whether it meaningfully converts is another matter. Being indispensable to Washington and Tehran is not the same as being investable, and the security concerns that slowed Reko Diq have not eased because Islamabad’s phone rings more often.
Questions on the ground
I will be in Islamabad for PMIF on November 12 and 13, with time on either side of the forum. Kazakhstan taught me that the planned story is rarely the real one; none of my best pieces from Astana were the plan. So I am going with three questions rather than a script.
The first is the route. How does mineral freight move from Balochistan to the coast, who secures it, and is the Hormuz disruption building lasting capacity or only a detour? The second is the people. With the flagship moving in slow motion, are the geologists and engineers Pakistan has trained finding work in the sector, or leaving it? The third is the leverage. Can Pakistan’s leaders convert it into meaningful progress on the ground, starting with the security improvements Barrick’s review is waiting on before mid-2027? And who in federal and provincial government will do the delivering?
In February, the question was whether institutions can deliver the deposits. Eight months later, the bar has risen. They now have to deliver on one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper projects on complex and shifting trade routes in a region where Islamabad has unexpectedly become a point of contact for both sides. That makes for a harder test, and a more interesting one.
The next dispatch will come from the ground in Islamabad.
* Erik Groves is a contributing analyst for MINING.COM and Corporate Strategy and In-House Counsel at Morgan Companies. He will attend and provide coverage of the Pakistan Minerals Investment Forum (PMIF) in Islamabad on November 12 and 13.
Event organizers are assisting with travel, accommodation, and interview coordination with key participants. Neither Groves nor MINING.COM is receiving payment for coverage. All reporting, analysis, interview selection and editorial decisions remain independent of the organizers, who have no right to review or approve content before publication.
Source: https://www.mining.com/ground-view-pakistan-same-hall-different-world/
