Critical Minerals and the Energy Transition: Where Pakistan Fits

A copper deposit in Reko Diq, Balochistan, is estimated to hold 5.9 billion tonnes of ore. That's not a typo. It's one of the largest undeveloped copper-gold deposits on Earth, and most people outside the mining world have never heard of it.

I think about that number a lot. Because the global energy transition runs on copper. An EV needs roughly four times more copper than a combustion car. Offshore wind needs about 8 tonnes per megawatt. Grid upgrades, battery storage, charging networks — all copper-hungry. And the world is running short.

So where does Pakistan fit into any of this? Honestly, the answer is more interesting than I expected when I started looking into it.

The deposits nobody's been talking about

Pakistan's Geological Survey has mapped significant occurrences of copper, lithium, cobalt, chromite, antimony, and rare earth elements across Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Gilgit-Baltistan. Reko Diq gets the headlines — and the $7 billion Barrick Gold investment that came with the 2022 reconciliation deal — but it's not the only story.

The Chagai belt alone hosts multiple porphyry copper systems. Saindak has been producing for years (mostly shipping concentrate to China). Lithium pegmatites have been identified in Kohistan and along parts of the northern belt, though the grades and tonnages are still being verified. There's chromite in Muslim Bagh that's been mined since the British era. And antimony — critical for flame retardants and lead-acid batteries — shows up in Krinj and Awan in commercially interesting quantities.

But here's the thing. Mapping a deposit and developing a mine are two completely different sports. The gap between them is where most of the country's mineral story has died for the last fifty years.

Why? A few reasons stacked on top of each other. Security concerns in Balochistan. Royalty disputes between federal and provincial governments. The Reko Diq arbitration mess that cost the country a $5.9 billion award before it got renegotiated. Infrastructure that doesn't reach the deposits. And a chronic lack of high-quality exploration data, which is what scares serious capital away more than anything else.

That last one is the part I find most fixable.

Exploration is finally getting cheaper

For decades, finding minerals meant boots on the ground, drilling rigs, and seven-year timelines before anyone knew if a deposit was real. That math doesn't work in countries where political risk premium already eats your margin.

What's changing is the front end of exploration. Satellite-based spectral analysis can now identify mineral signatures across thousands of square kilometers in weeks, not years. Hyperspectral sensors pick up alteration zones — the chemical fingerprints around ore bodies — without anyone setting foot on the site. Platforms like GeoMine AI are doing exactly this kind of work, layering Sentinel-2 and ASTER data with machine learning models trained on known deposit signatures to flag prospective zones before a single drill turns.

I'm not saying satellites replace geologists. They don't. But they tell you where to send the geologists, which collapses the cost of being wrong by maybe 80%. For a country like Pakistan, where exploration budgets are tight and ground access is complicated, that's not a small thing. It's the difference between a sector that attracts $200 million a year in junior mining capital and one that attracts $20 million.

The other shift is who's interested. Five years ago, critical minerals exploration was a Chinese-and-Australian conversation in this region. Now Saudi Arabia's Manara Minerals is actively scouting. The US has signed a critical minerals framework with Pakistan as part of broader strategic discussions. The EU's raw materials act lists most of what Pakistan has. Suddenly there are buyers who don't want everything routed through Beijing.

What needs to actually happen

Look, I've watched enough commodity stories to know that geology doesn't automatically become GDP. Indonesia turned nickel into a downstream processing empire because it banned raw ore exports and forced smelter investment. Chile built a competent state copper company alongside private majors. The DRC… well, the DRC is the warning, not the model.

For Pakistan to matter in the lithium-cobalt-copper supply chains of the 2030s, three things need to happen in parallel.

First, exploration data has to become public, standardized, and digital. Right now, a lot of historical Geological Survey of Pakistan work sits in paper reports in Islamabad. A serious national geodatabase — open to qualified explorers — would do more for investment than any tax holiday.

Second, the provincial-federal royalty question needs a final answer. Investors will accept high royalties. They won't accept uncertain royalties. There's a difference, and Pakistani policymakers have historically confused the two.

Third, processing has to happen onshore for at least some of the value chain. Shipping copper concentrate to be smelted elsewhere is the colonial model. Building even one mid-sized smelter, one lithium hydroxide plant, one rare earth separation facility — that's where the real industrial story starts. China figured this out twenty years ago. Indonesia figured it out five years ago. Pakistan is late, but not yet too late.

The energy transition is a 30-year build-out. Demand for copper alone is projected to double by 2035. There's room for new suppliers, especially ones sitting on Tier-1 deposits with friendly geography toward both Gulf and Chinese markets.

Whether Pakistan shows up to that party with a serious plan or with the same brochure it's been handing out since 1998 — that's the open question. And I'm genuinely not sure which way it breaks.