Saudi Arabia's industry ministry has qualified 24 companies and consortia to compete for exploration licences across three multi-mineral belts covering about 13,000 sq km in five regions. The ground is prospective for gold, silver, copper, nickel and zinc.
Saudi Arabia has qualified 24 local and international companies and consortia to bid for mineral exploration licences across three multi-mineral belts, opening the competitive stage of the Kingdom's tenth licensing round.
The belts cover about 13,000 square kilometres across five regions — Madinah, Makkah, Riyadh, Al Qassim and Hail — and are prospective for gold, silver, copper, nickel and zinc.
The first is the Nabithah/Ad Duwayhi belt, also referred to as Dahlat Shabeb, which hosts the Ad Duwayhi mine, producing around 180,000 ounces of gold a year. The second is the Sukhaybarat/Al-Safra belt, described by the ministry as prospective for gold, copper, silver, zinc and nickel. The third is the Al-Nuqrah belt, known for gold deposits and for copper- and zinc-rich volcanogenic massive sulphide mineralisation — the deposit type that accounts for much of the base metal endowment along the Arabian Shield.
The qualified list mixes established names with first-time entrants. Ma'aden is among the bidders, alongside Canada's Power Metallic Mines, Indonesia's state-controlled PT Aneka Tambang, Australia's Danakali, Wildsky Resources, and Saudi companies including Emerald Sources Mining, Sahara Mining and Thurb Al-Hayya for Trading.
The presence of foreign juniors and mid-tier producers is the part the ministry is most likely to count as progress. Exploration is a business that large established producers are structurally poor at and specialist explorers are structurally good at, and a licensing regime that attracts only national champions tends to generate mine extensions rather than discoveries.
Qualification is not an award. It is a pre-screening of technical and financial capacity that establishes who is allowed to compete; the licences themselves are allocated at a later stage, and in the Saudi system contested sites go to a multi-round public auction. Auctioning contested ground rather than allocating it administratively also puts a price on prospectivity, which gives the ministry a market signal about which belts the industry actually rates. No ground has changed hands yet.
The reference point for what these rounds actually produce is the ninth, which the ministry concluded in January. It awarded 172 sites to 24 companies and consortia across three belts in the Riyadh, Madinah and Qassim regions, 76 of them through public auction, with winners committing to spend more than SAR671 million on exploration in the first two years. That committed work programme, rather than the number of licences, is the figure worth tracking: it is contractual, time-bound and denominated in drilling.
The rounds are the mechanism by which the government is trying to get private capital onto ground the Saudi Geological Survey has mapped but nobody has drilled to a modern standard. The ministry values the Kingdom's unexploited mineral resources at about SAR9.4 trillion ($2.5 trillion), an estimate of geological potential rather than of proven metal, and the licensing structure — committed spending obligations plus auctions for contested ground — is designed to stop licences being taken and then sat on.
Whether it works will not be visible for years. National exploration spending has risen to about SAR1.05 billion a year, roughly five times the level of four years earlier, but from a very low base, and much of the acreage on offer in this round has not been systematically explored. The measure of success is metres drilled and, eventually, discoveries — neither of which a qualification list can deliver.