Rare Earth Elements in Northern Pakistan: What Early Exploration in Gilgit-Baltistan Is Actually Showing

Last March I was standing on a ridge above the Shigar valley with a handheld XRF, watching the screen blink through cerium, lanthanum and neodymium readings on a weathered pegmatite outcrop. The numbers weren't world-class. But they weren't noise either. That's roughly where we are with rare earths in northern Pakistan right now — past the "is there anything here" stage, not yet at the "here are the JORC tonnages" stage.

I want to be honest about that, because I get emails every week from buyers in Rotterdam, Shanghai and Houston asking whether GB has the next big REE district. The truthful answer is: we have geology that justifies serious work, we have some encouraging early results, and we have a long road of drilling and metallurgy ahead. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Why Gilgit-Baltistan Sits on the Geological Map for REE at All

The reason rare earth elements Pakistan keeps coming up in critical-minerals conversations isn't marketing. It's the rocks.

GB sits at the collision zone of the Indian and Eurasian plates. You've got the Kohistan-Ladakh island arc, the Karakoram batholith to the north, the Main Mantle Thrust slicing through it, and an enormous suite of leucogranites and pegmatites threading through the high valleys. That's the same broad family of intrusive rocks that hosts REE-bearing pegmatites and carbonatite-related deposits elsewhere in the world.

Three settings interest us specifically for rare earth mining Gilgit-Baltistan:

• LCT and NYF pegmatites in the Shigar, Braldu and Hushe valleys — the same belts where we're chasing lithium and tantalum, but where we're also seeing monazite, xenotime and allanite in heavy-mineral concentrates
• Alkaline complexes and possible carbonatite leads further north toward the Karakoram axis, where soil geochem has flagged anomalous La-Ce-Nd-Y
• Placer concentrations in the Indus, Gilgit and Hunza drainage — monazite sands as a by-product stream of our alluvial gold operations

That third one is underappreciated. We're already moving river gravels for gold. The heavy mineral fraction includes monazite, and we've been logging it rather than discarding it. Not a primary play. But not zero either.

What the Early Numbers Actually Look Like

I'll give you ranges rather than cherry-picked highs, because cherry-picking is how juniors lose credibility with serious off-take buyers.

From rock-chip sampling across roughly 340 samples taken over 2023-2024 across four of our pegmatite concessions:

• Total rare earth oxides (TREO) running between 0.18% and 1.4% in pegmatite selvages, with a handful of outliers above 2%
• Neodymium plus praseodymium making up around 17-22% of the TREO basket on average — which is the fraction the magnet buyers actually care about
• Heavy rare earth (HREE) ratios are modest in the pegmatites we've sampled so far. Mostly LREE-dominated. The HREE story, if it exists, is more likely in the alkaline targets further north
• Thorium levels in monazite concentrates are non-trivial (0.4-1.1% ThO2 range), which has handling and processing implications anyone serious already knows about

For context — these aren't Mountain Pass or Mount Weld numbers. They're closer to what early-stage African and Brazilian projects were showing at equivalent exploration stages. The honest read is: enough to warrant trenching, drilling and proper metallurgical test work. Not enough to start signing off-take next quarter.

We've sent splits to two labs — one in Pakistan, one outside — to keep ourselves honest. ICP-MS comes back broadly consistent. The XRF in the field is just a screening tool; nobody should be making investment decisions on handheld readings and I'd be wary of any operator who quotes them as final.

What Has to Happen Next, and What We Need Partners For

REE exploration Pakistan is at the stage where capital and technical partnership matter more than additional ground. We've got the licences. We've got access. What we don't have in-house — and won't pretend to — is a separation flowsheet for a mixed monazite-xenotime-allanite feed with elevated thorium.

Here's the thing about rare earths that copper or antimony guys sometimes underestimate when they first look at this space: mining is the easy part. Cracking the ore, separating the individual oxides, dealing with the radioactive tailings stream — that's where 80% of the capex and most of the technical risk sits. China figured this out forty years ago and that's why they still control roughly 85-90% of separation capacity globally.

So when I talk to potential JV partners about our REE concessions, I'm specifically interested in groups who bring one of three things:

1. Hydrometallurgical and solvent-extraction capability, or a relationship with a tolling facility that can take a mixed concentrate
2. Strategic off-take backed by end-users — magnet makers, defence primes, EV OEMs — who need supply outside the Chinese system
3. Capital for a proper drill programme (we're scoping a 4,000-6,000 metre first-pass on the most advanced of our pegmatite targets)

Logistics-wise, GB is more workable than people assume. The Karakoram Highway runs to Kashgar, which puts Chinese processing within trucking distance. Karachi port is roughly 1,600 km south for sea freight to Europe, the Gulf or East Asia. Bulk concentrate moves. It's not Western Australia, but it's not the moon either.

I used to think the rare earth story in Pakistan would lag the copper and antimony story by years. After the last eighteen months of fieldwork, I'm revising that. Not because we've found a giant — we haven't, and I won't pretend we have — but because the geological case is stronger than I expected, and the global appetite for non-Chinese REE supply has gone from polite interest to genuine urgency.

Anyone working seriously in this space already knows the magnet supply math doesn't add up for 2030. The question is which new districts come online in time. Whether GB ends up being one of them depends on the work we and our partners do over the next three or four years.

What would you want to see in the next round of assays before taking this further?