Why Pakistan Will Be a Tier-1 Critical Minerals Jurisdiction by 2030

Reko Diq alone is projected to produce 200,000 tonnes of copper a year at steady state. That's one project. And it's the one everyone quotes when they haven't looked at the rest of the country.

I want to talk about the rest of the country. Specifically why I think Pakistan crosses into tier-1 status for critical minerals supply by 2030 — not because a minister said so at a conference, but because of what's actually happening on the ground in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Gilgit-Baltistan where we operate.

Look, I'm biased. I hold 16 concessions in GB. But bias doesn't change assay results, and it doesn't change the fact that four of the metals we're sitting on — copper, antimony, molybdenum, tungsten — are on the US, EU and UK critical minerals lists simultaneously. That's a rare overlap. Most jurisdictions have one or two. We have all four in commercial quantities, plus rare earth prospects the Chinese teams keep asking about.

The geology was never the problem

Here's the thing that took me years to accept: Pakistan's mineral endowment has been known since the 1960s. GSP mapping, UNDP work in the 70s, the Chinese geological surveys in the 90s — the rocks were catalogued a long time ago. The Chagai arc is the same metallogenic belt that gave Iran its porphyry copper and Afghanistan its Aynak deposit. The Karakoram batholith hosts the same tungsten-molybdenum skarn systems you see in the Chinese Pamirs across the border. Geology doesn't care about lines on a map.

What held us back wasn't the ground. It was everything above ground.

Licensing was slow. Provincial and federal jurisdictions overlapped in ways that made investors nervous. Security was patchy in some districts. Export logistics through Karachi were expensive relative to Chile or Australia. And honestly, the marketing was terrible — Pakistan pitched itself as a tourism country and a textiles country for thirty years while sitting on one of the last unexploited copper-gold belts on the planet.

That's changed. Not completely, but materially.

What actually shifted between 2022 and now

The Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) matters more than people outside Pakistan realise. It's a single-window body with military and civilian representation, and for the first time in my working life I've seen federal and provincial mining departments respond to the same email chain. That sounds boring. It's not. It's the single biggest de-risking event for foreign investors in Pakistan mining in twenty years.

Then Barrick's final investment decision on Reko Diq in late 2024. $7 billion committed. That doesn't just build one mine — it builds a precedent. Every JV term sheet I've seen circulate in the last six months references Reko Diq as the template. Royalty structures, repatriation of profits, dispute resolution seated in international arbitration. The playbook exists now.

Saudi Arabia's $500 million commitment to Pakistani mining through Manara Minerals. The Chinese interest in antimony (Beijing restricted antimony exports in September 2024 — prices went from $12,000 to over $25,000 per tonne inside a year, and every antimony holder in Pakistan got a phone call). The US Geological Survey delegation that quietly visited Islamabad in 2023. These aren't coincidences. These are supply-chain buyers doing exactly what they should be doing: finding the next tier of jurisdictions before their competitors do.

What tier-1 actually means

I want to be careful here because the term gets thrown around loosely. Tier-1 in mining language usually means three things: large-scale deposits (100+ million tonnes for base metals), long mine life (25+ years), and low-quartile operating costs. It's a deposit-quality definition, not a country-quality definition.

But there's a parallel usage — tier-1 jurisdiction — that means something different. It means a country where a major can commit ten-figure capex and reasonably expect to operate for three decades without expropriation, contract renegotiation, or infrastructure collapse. Chile is tier-1. Australia is tier-1. Peru is borderline. Indonesia is climbing.

Pakistan, honestly, isn't there yet. I'm not going to pretend it is. What I'm saying is the trajectory over the next five years puts us in the conversation, and here's why:

• Reko Diq operating successfully by 2028 answers the single largest institutional question (can a major operate at scale here?)
• The critical minerals list overlap gives us Western strategic interest we didn't have when it was just copper and gold
• The GB and KP concession holders — us included — are consolidating and moving from artisanal-adjacent operations to proper JORC-compliant exploration
• CPEC infrastructure, whatever you think of it politically, has genuinely reduced logistics costs from the north

I used to think Pakistan's mining future was 15 years out. I'd tell buyers to check back in 2035. I was wrong about that. The antimony squeeze, the tungsten export controls out of China, the tariff wars — these have compressed the timeline. Buyers who would've waited are moving now because their downstream customers (Tesla, the DoD, Airbus, the German auto tier-1s) are demanding non-China supply lines by 2027, not 2035.

What we're doing about it from GB

We've spent the last two years doing the unsexy work. Systematic sampling across our concessions. Getting assays done at labs buyers actually trust (ALS, SGS — not the local labs that inflate numbers). Cleaning up the paperwork. Signing NDAs with three separate off-take groups from China, one from the Gulf, and having preliminary conversations with a European trader on antimony.

None of that makes headlines. All of it is what a tier-1 jurisdiction looks like when it's being built from the concession level up.

The question I keep getting from serious buyers is a fair one: why should we look at Pakistan before Kazakhstan, before Mongolia, before the DRC? The honest answer is grade, strategic-metals overlap, and the fact that we're early. Being early is worth something in this market. It won't be worth as much in 2028.

Anyone doing due diligence on Pakistan right now is doing it at the right time. The people who wait until Reko Diq pours first concentrate will be paying a different price for entry.

Which is fine. Somebody has to pay it.