Pakistan’s mining future at PMIF: permitting and infrastructure lens for projects
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
Industry leaders, investors and policymakers will convene in Islamabad in April for the Pakistan Mineral Investment Forum, with attention centred on Barrick’s Reko Diq copper-gold project and wider critical minerals such as cobalt, lithium, rare earths and zinc. Analyst Erik Groves will spend over 10 days in Pakistan, visiting Balochistan project areas, federal and provincial mining offices, and university geology departments to map how permitting, power, water and transport planning actually function. The series will probe whether Pakistan’s “institutional middle” can deliver predictable approvals and coordinated infrastructure for large-scale copper and critical mineral developments.
Technical Brief
- Years of legal dispute and international arbitration preceded the current restart of Reko Diq’s development.
- Institutional risk is framed around misaligned approvals, slipping power and transport schedules, and federal–provincial timing gaps.
- The “institutional middle” includes mid-level regulators, logistics engineers, university geology departments and infrastructure planners coordinating remote projects.
- Ground View reporting will rely on extended site visits and office observation, not conference-session summaries.
Our Take
Barrick’s role at the Reko Diq copper-gold project links Pakistan directly to the same copper growth narrative our database tracks in Zambia’s Domes Region and at Lumwana, suggesting the company may increasingly apply its African copper playbook (large-scale sulphide projects, high-intensity flotation) to South Asian assets.
With Pakistan positioning itself on cobalt, lithium and rare earths, the comparison to Congo and China in this piece underlines that any Pakistan critical minerals build-out will be judged against existing high-risk/high-reward jurisdictions already prominent in our coverage, which could influence how Western and Chinese capital price country risk at PMIF.
The US$50–150 million restart range cited for Congo’s Rubaya mine provides a rough benchmark for mid-scale critical minerals restarts; for Pakistan, that implies that even a handful of comparable cobalt or rare earth projects would require capital pools on the order of several hundred million dollars to achieve meaningful export volumes.
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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