Copper in Gilgit-Baltistan: What the Drill Holes and the Comparables Actually Say

I had a buyer from Shanghai on a Zoom call last month who asked me one question before anything else: "Just tell me the grade." Not the geology story. Not the licensing structure. The grade.

Fair enough. That's how copper deals actually start.

So let me do that here, properly, for the copper concessions we hold across Gilgit-Baltistan. No hype, no resource estimates I can't defend, just what surface sampling and trenching have given us so far, and what the regional analogues suggest is reasonable to expect at depth.

What we're actually seeing at surface

Across our copper-bearing blocks in GB — and I'll group them broadly into the Kohistan island arc terrain and the Karakoram batholith margin — surface chip samples and trench results are running in a range I'd describe as encouraging but not yet bankable. Meaning: we have the geochemical signature and the structural setting of a porphyry-epithermal system, but we haven't put enough diamond drill holes in the ground to talk about JORC or NI 43-101 categories. Anyone who tells you otherwise about ground in GB right now is selling something.

Surface grades on our better blocks are sitting between 0.4% and 1.8% Cu in chip and channel samples, with sporadic higher hits — one trench gave us 3.2% over 4 metres, which I treat as interesting but not representative. The mineralisation we're chasing is mostly chalcopyrite and bornite in altered diorite and granodiorite host rocks, with secondary malachite and azurite at outcrop where weathering has done its work. Classic porphyry signature on a few blocks. On others, the picture looks more skarn-related, with garnet-pyroxene assemblages where the intrusives have cooked the surrounding marbles and calc-silicates.

A couple of blocks also carry meaningful gold and molybdenum credits. One in particular is running about 0.6 g/t Au alongside the copper in surface samples, which changes the economics completely if it holds at depth.

Honestly, the early surface work I commissioned back in 2019 I'd now do differently. I was too focused on the high-grade outcrops and not systematic enough about the lower-grade halo. That halo is where the tonnage lives in a porphyry. Took me a while to internalise that.

The comparables that actually matter

When buyers ask what these deposits could become, I point them at three specific systems, because the geological setting genuinely overlaps.

Reko Diq, Balochistan. Same country, different province, but it's the obvious starting point. Reko Diq H14 and H15 carry around 0.41% Cu and 0.22 g/t Au across a resource north of 5.9 billion tonnes. It's a calc-alkaline porphyry in an island arc setting. Kohistan, which several of our blocks sit in, is itself a fossilised island arc — the only complete one exposed on land anywhere in the world. The mineralising fluids that built Reko Diq are the same family of fluids you'd expect in Kohistan. The question isn't whether the geology supports porphyry copper. It does. The question is scale and continuity at depth.

Saindak, also Balochistan. Smaller, mined since 1995 by MCC. Reserves around 412 million tonnes at 0.5% Cu equivalent. This is the more realistic near-term comparable for several of our blocks, in my view. Not every porphyry becomes a Reko Diq, and pretending otherwise to a buyer is how you lose credibility fast.

Oyu Tolgoi, Mongolia. I bring this up because Mongolia in 2001 looked, to international capital, the way Pakistan looks now: difficult jurisdiction, weak infrastructure, political questions. Rio went in anyway because the rocks were too good to ignore. Oyu Tolgoi is now one of the largest copper-gold mines on earth. I'm not saying we have an OT. I'm saying the international capital logic — go where the rocks are, sort the rest later — has played out before in jurisdictions written off as too hard.

Tonnage potential, said carefully

Here's where I have to be careful, because overseas buyers have heard too many Pakistani concession-holders quote billion-tonne numbers based on a couple of grab samples.

What I can defend: our larger copper blocks have surface mineralised footprints ranging from roughly 1.2 km² to over 8 km² based on mapping and stream sediment geochemistry. For a porphyry system of those dimensions, with the alteration zoning we're observing, an exploration target in the hundreds of millions of tonnes range at sub-1% Cu is geologically reasonable to test for. That's a target, not a resource. The difference matters and any serious JV partner will know it.

To convert that target into a resource we need diamond drilling — I'd estimate 15,000 to 25,000 metres of core across a priority block to get to an inferred category, and that's a USD 8–12 million programme at GB logistics costs. Helicopter support adds to that on the higher blocks. Road access on most of our concessions is decent in summer, terrible from late November to March.

What I tell serious buyers

Look, if you want a producing mine to off-take from tomorrow, GB isn't that. Not yet. What's on offer is ground in a geologically world-class belt that has been under-explored for political and access reasons, not geological ones, and that sits inside a country actively reforming its mineral export framework. The Special Investment Facilitation Council route now lets foreign partners take direct equity in concession-level JVs without the historical headaches.

The copper story in Pakistan is going to be written in the next ten years. Reko Diq is the proof-of-concept that finally got built. GB is where a lot of the next chapters get drilled. And I'd rather have a partner who understands that timeline than one who needs a press release every quarter.

Anyone wanting the block-by-block sampling data and shapefiles, that conversation happens under NDA — drop me a line through the site.