Tungsten and Molybdenum in the Karakoram: Skarn and Greisen Systems Worth Drilling

Two weeks ago I was standing on a talus slope above a tributary of the Shigar valley, picking up scheelite float that fluoresced blue-white under a shortwave UV lamp. The nearest granite contact was maybe 400 metres uphill. That's the kind of morning that reminds you why the Karakoram is under-explored, not over-explored.

Most overseas buyers I speak with — traders in Rotterdam, procurement people at Japanese trading houses, a few American defence-adjacent groups — assume Pakistan's tungsten story is theoretical. It isn't. It's just undrilled. There's a difference.

Let me walk through what we're actually seeing on the ground across our concessions, and which target types I'd put drill money into first.

Why the Karakoram hosts W-Mo in the first place

The geology here isn't subtle. You've got the Karakoram batholith — a long, composite intrusive body of mostly biotite granite and two-mica leucogranite — pushing into a mixed package of Palaeozoic to Mesozoic carbonates, calc-silicates and pelitic schists. Miocene-age leucogranites in particular are the ones that matter for tungsten. They're peraluminous, often tourmaline-bearing, and they carry the volatile and incompatible element budget (B, F, W, Mo, Sn, sometimes Be and Li) you need for a proper greisen or skarn system.

The classic analogue is southern China's Nanling belt. Same tectonic story more or less — continental collision, crustal-melt granites, carbonate wall rocks. Nanling produces something like 47% of global tungsten. I'm not claiming the Karakoram matches that endowment. But the fertility indicators are there, and the pluton-to-marble contact strike length across our license blocks alone is over 60 kilometres of largely unexplored contact.

Honestly, when I first started looking at this ground in 2018, I thought the main prize was copper-gold from the Kohistan arc further south. Molybdenum and tungsten felt like a bonus. I got that wrong. The economics of a decent W-Mo skarn, with today's APT prices sitting where they are and moly holding above $20/lb, can be better than a mid-grade porphyry copper — with a fraction of the tonnage.

What we're actually seeing — skarn targets

On three of our sixteen concessions, we've mapped classic exoskarn assemblages at the granite-marble contact. Garnet (grossular-andradite), pyroxene (mostly diopside-hedenbergite), wollastonite, and in the retrograde overprint — the important bit — scheelite, molybdenite, chalcopyrite and pyrrhotite.

Grab samples. I want to be careful here because grab samples flatter you and I've watched too many juniors build press releases on them. But for what it's worth:

• Scheelite-bearing garnet skarn, one locality near Bunji: 1.4% WO3, 0.08% Mo, trace Cu
• Massive pyrrhotite-molybdenite in retrograde skarn, Skardu district concession: 0.31% Mo, 0.18% WO3, 12 g/t Ag
• Wollastonite-scheelite bands, another locality: 0.6% WO3 across a ~2 m channel sample

These are surface. They tell you the system fired. They don't tell you geometry or continuity. That's what drilling is for, and that's what we're structuring joint ventures around — a proper phased programme, starting with detailed ground magnetics and IP, then 3,000 to 5,000 metres of diamond core on the most promising two contacts.

Skarn tungsten Pakistan projects have one very useful property compared with vein systems: scheelite responds to UV, and skarns tend to be zoned and mappable at surface. You can do a lot of geological work before you spend on drilling. Which matters when you're operating at 3,500 metres elevation with a six-month field season.

Greisen and stockwork moly

Separate target type, and arguably the more interesting one for molybdenum-heavy off-take. In one of our northern blocks, we've got a leucogranite cupola with pervasive greisen alteration — muscovite-quartz-topaz-fluorite — and a stockwork of quartz-molybdenite veinlets cutting the apical zone. Think of it as a smaller-scale Climax-type or Endako-type target.

Molybdenite occurs as coarse rosettes on vein selvages and as disseminations in the greisen itself. Sampling has returned:

• 0.14% Mo over a 4 m channel in stockwork zone
• 0.09% Mo average across nine channel samples in the greisen envelope
• Anomalous WO3 (0.02–0.11%) in the same envelope, plus meaningful bismuth

A porphyry-moly guy from a Chinese state group looked at the outcrop photos last year and said, more or less, that if this were in Yunnan it'd already have a 43-101 on it. Fair point. The reason it doesn't is that Gilgit-Baltistan didn't have a workable mineral title regime for foreign JV partners until fairly recently, and access to a lot of these valleys required jeep tracks that only opened up in the last decade.

What a serious partner should ask us

If you're evaluating this seriously — and I mean the technical people, not the deal team — here's what I'd want you to push us on:

1. Structural control. Are the skarns stratabound, or fault-focused? Both, in our case, and it changes the drill spacing.
2. Retrograde overprint intensity. This is where the scheelite and moly actually sit. Prograde-only skarns are pretty rocks and not much else.
3. Depth to fresh granite under the greisen. Cupolas can be thin. You want to know if you're drilling into a thickening or thinning system.
4. Metallurgy. Scheelite in garnet skarn is not always friendly. Gravity plus flotation usually works but recoveries vary and we're honest about not having locked-cycle test data yet.
5. Logistics. Concentrate out of Gilgit-Baltistan moves by road to Karachi or, increasingly, via the Khunjerab route into Xinjiang for Chinese off-takers. Both work. Neither is cheap. Budget accordingly.

What we're not doing is pretending these are resources. They're targets. Good ones, in a fertile belt, with the right rock types touching the right intrusions and the right minerals sitting on surface where you can pick them up.

Anybody who tells you they've got a defined tungsten resource in the Karakoram right now is either exaggerating or drilling somewhere I haven't heard about. Which — fair enough — is possible. It's a big range.

If you want the sample location maps and the leucogranite geochemistry we've run, that conversation happens under NDA. Reach out through the site.