Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources has qualified 24 local and international bidders for Round 10 of its exploration licensing programme, covering 13,000 square kilometres across five regions. Seventeen carried over from Round 9 pre-qualification and seven completed a new questionnaire.
Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources has qualified 24 local and international companies and consortia to bid in Round 10 of its mineral exploration licensing programme, closing the technical and financial evaluation stage and moving the round into block selection.
The belts on offer cover roughly 13,000 square kilometres across five regions — Madinah, Makkah, Riyadh, Qassim and Hail — and extend ground first opened in Round 9, according to the Saudi Press Agency. Qualified bidders will now choose sites through Taadeen, the ministry's mining licensing platform.
Seventeen of the 24 were already pre-qualified under Round 9. The remaining seven completed a fresh pre-qualification questionnaire, among them Ma'aden, Indonesia's PT ANTAM, Canada's Power Metallic Mines and Wildsky Resources, a consortium of Danakali and Masadar Al-Zamarda for Mining, a pairing of Anaam Al Qarat for Trading with Sahara Mining, and Thurb Al-Hayya for Trading.
The composition of the acreage is the part worth reading closely. This is not frontier ground. The Nabithah and Ad Duwayhi belt contains the Ad Duwayhi mine, which produces in the order of 180,000 ounces of gold a year. The Sukhaybarat and Al-Safra belt hosts the Sukhaybarat and Bulghah operations and is prospective for gold, copper, silver, zinc and nickel. The Al-Nuqrah belt carries gold alongside copper- and zinc-bearing volcanogenic massive sulphide mineralisation.
Offering exploration ground adjacent to producing assets is a specific choice. It shortens the distance between a discovery and a plant that could treat it, and it lowers the geological risk a bidder is asked to carry, which tends to draw mid-tier companies that cannot fund a decade of greenfield work. It also concentrates competition: the same belts that are attractive for those reasons are the ones the largest domestic producer already knows best.
The round follows Round 9, which the ministry concluded in January by awarding 172 mining sites to 24 companies. Taken together the two rounds describe a licensing programme that has shifted from opening large areas to cycling bidders through structured competitions at a regular cadence — the difference between an invitation and a pipeline.
The ministry puts the kingdom's untapped mineral wealth at around $2.5 trillion, an estimate of in-ground value across the Arabian Shield. Converting an estimate of that kind into defined reserves is what exploration licensing exists to do, and the rounds are steadily producing the modern survey data that the work requires.
For the wider industrial programme, mining sits upstream of targets the kingdom has set elsewhere. Domestic copper, zinc and nickel supply matters to the electrical and battery manufacturing that industrial policy has been pushing to localise, and gold revenue funds none of that but does underwrite the operators' balance sheets. The gap between an exploration licence and a producing mine is measured in years, and Round 10 is at the front of that sequence, not the end of it.
The ministry has not said when block selection will close or when licences will be issued.