Metso’s €128m gold plant for Ma’aden’s Ar Rjum mine: delivery risks and design notes for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
Metso will supply a gold processing plant worth about €128 million ($149 million) to Ma’aden’s Ar Rjum mine, located roughly 200 km northeast of Ta’if in Saudi Arabia’s Makkah Region. The package includes process equipment plus advisory services covering installation, commissioning and start-up, indicating a turnkey-style delivery rather than simple component supply. For project teams, the integrated support should reduce interface risk during ramp-up and streamline process optimisation in the early production phase.
Technical Brief
- Scope explicitly bundles long-duration advisory services through installation, commissioning and operational start-up phases.
- Metso’s role extends beyond OEM supply into on-site process support and optimisation during ramp-up.
- Advisory inclusion reduces interface risk between mechanical, electrical and process contractors during early operations.
- Package-style processing plant awards of this scale are increasingly used by Gulf gold projects to compress schedules.
Our Take
The ~€128 million gold plant order at Ar Rjum sits alongside a ~€180 million copper smelter contract in Asia in our database, underscoring Metso’s current tilt towards large, greenfield processing packages rather than incremental brownfield upgrades.
Multiple recent items on Metso – including record stirred mill sales and new Life Cycle Services contracts – suggest Ma'aden’s Ar Rjum plant in Saudi Arabia is likely to be a candidate for bundled aftermarket and optimisation agreements rather than a pure equipment sale.
Within our 617 Mining stories, gold appears less frequently than copper in Metso-related coverage, so this Saudi Arabia award signals that Metso is extending its recent copper-heavy project pipeline into higher-value precious metals flowsheets in the Middle East.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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