Saudi Arabia mineral wealth was valued at roughly USD 1.3 trillion in the original 2016 Saudi Geological Survey baseline and revised in January 2024 to SAR 9.375 trillion, or about USD 2.5 trillion. That endowment constitutes one of the largest underdeveloped mining provinces on the planet. The Arabian Shield, the Precambrian basement underlying the western third of the country, hosts gold, silver, copper, zinc, lead, chromium, nickel, tantalum, niobium, and rare earth occurrences. Sedimentary basins to the north and east contain phosphate, bauxite, magnesite, kaolin, and limestone. After two decades of underinvestment relative to the petroleum sector, mining is now the third pillar of the National Industrial Development and Logistics Programme and a quantifiable lever inside the broader Vision 2030 diversification framework.
The Mineral Endowment
Mapping campaigns funded by the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources and executed by the Saudi Geological Survey have catalogued over 5,300 mineral occurrences. The 2024 revaluation, announced at the Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh, raised the headline figure 90 percent above the 2016 estimate. The uplift came from three sources: additional tonnage in proven phosphate, copper, zinc, and gold deposits; new discoveries of rare earth elements and transition metals outside the historically mapped belts; and a fair-market reassessment of in-situ commodity values at 2023-2024 spot prices.
The northern phosphate basin around Wa’ad Al Shamal holds an estimated 2 billion tonnes of phosphate ore, placing the Kingdom alongside Morocco and China among the top phosphate-rock sovereigns. Bauxite reserves at Az Zabirah feed the integrated alumina refinery and aluminium smelter at Ras Al-Khair on the Arabian Gulf coast. Gold mineralisation along the Arabian Shield runs from Mahd Ad Dhahab in the north to As Suq in the south, with at least nine operating or development-stage mines under Ma’aden control. Copper, zinc, and lead occur in volcanogenic massive sulphide systems at Jabal Sayid, Al Amar, and Khnaiguiyah. Newer airborne geophysical surveys mapping roughly 600,000 square kilometres in 2024 have flagged rare earth element anomalies and lithium-bearing brines that did not appear in the 2016 inventory.
Aramco confirmed lithium concentrations of up to 400 parts per million in Ghawar oilfield brines in late 2024 and announced a pilot project for direct lithium extraction in early 2025. The DLE pathway, partnered with technology providers SLB, LightOre, and LiHyTech, bypasses traditional evaporation ponds, accelerates extraction rates, and curtails water consumption, all decisive constraints in arid operating environments. Combined with hard-rock lithium prospects in the southern Arabian Shield, the Kingdom is positioning itself as a credible non-Chinese supplier of battery-grade lithium carbonate and hydroxide. Rare earth element prospectivity has been flagged at multiple anomalies in the Hejaz and along the Yemen border, with grade and tonnage to be confirmed through 2026-2027 drill programmes.
Ma’aden: The National Mining Champion
Ma’aden is the primary corporate vehicle for monetising the Kingdom’s geology. Listed on the Tadawul since 2008, the company is majority-controlled by the Public Investment Fund, with Aramco taking a strategic stake in 2025 as part of the lithium and transition-metals joint venture. Ma’aden runs four core business units: gold and base metals, phosphate and fertilisers, aluminium, and a new minerals division covering lithium, copper expansion, and rare earths.
Gold production reached approximately 400,000 ounces in recent years across the Mahd Ad Dhahab, Bulghah, As Suq, Ad Duwayhi, and Mansourah-Massarah complexes. Management has guided to 500,000 ounces in 2025 and 700,000 ounces by 2028, with a longer-range ambition to double output by 2030 and quadruple by 2040 as new discoveries advance through feasibility. Ma’aden disclosed at the Future Minerals Forum in January 2025 that exploration in 2024 added roughly 7.8 million ounces of gold to reportable mineral resources, the largest annual addition in company history.
The phosphate business, structured through the Ma’aden Wa’ad Al Shamal Phosphate Company joint venture with Mosaic and SABIC, produced a record 6.72 million tonnes of di-ammonium phosphate in 2025, up 9 percent year on year. The phosphate division generated SAR 20.77 billion in 2025 revenue, with EBITDA margins expanding to 47 percent on the back of firmer global fertiliser prices. Together with the older Al Jalamid mine and the Ras Al-Khair processing complex, Saudi Arabia has become the world’s third-largest phosphate-fertiliser exporter behind Morocco and China.
The aluminium operation at Ras Al-Khair is one of the largest fully integrated complexes globally: a bauxite mine at Az Zabirah feeds an alumina refinery (1.8 million tonnes per year), which supplies a 740,000-tonne primary smelter and a downstream rolling mill producing can-stock and automotive sheet. The Ras Al-Khair industrial cluster, built inside the Ras Al-Khair investment zone, captures the full value chain from ore to finished product on a single site. Aluminium sales reached SAR 10.99 billion in 2025, up 9 percent on stronger LME pricing.
Base metals output centres on Jabal Sayid, a copper mine operated as a 50/50 joint venture between Ma’aden and Barrick under the Ma’aden Barrick Copper Company. The mine reached its design rate of approximately 130 million pounds of contained copper per annum in 2023 and is being expanded toward 100,000 tonnes of copper concentrate per year. Underground contractor Byrnecut completed 4,300 metres of large-scale mine development, hauled 3.1 million tonnes of ore, and drilled 270,000 metres of production holes in 2025.
Group financials closed 2025 with revenue of SAR 38.58 billion (up 19 percent), net profit of SAR 7.35 billion (up 156 percent), and record production across phosphate fertiliser, gold, and aluminium rolled products. The 2025 result confirms the inflection point that began in 2023, when Ma’aden’s earnings recovered from soft ammonia and aluminium pricing and the new Mansourah-Massarah gold complex came on stream.
Mining Sector Development Strategy
The Saudi Mining Investment Law of 2020, replacing the 2004 framework, is the regulatory anchor for the sector. Substantive reforms include 30-year exploitation licences renewable for 20 years, exploration licences extendable to seven years, royalty rates benchmarked against the lower quartile of competing jurisdictions, electronic licensing through the Ta’adeen platform, and statutory protection of investor rights against arbitrary licence revocation. The Geological Survey is being separated from the Ministry into an independent National Geological Survey body to professionalise the data layer and accelerate pre-competitive geoscience.
The mining sector strategy sits inside the National Industrial Development and Logistics Programme, one of the eleven Vision 2030 Realisation Programmes. The current government target, restated by the Ministry in 2024-2025, is to grow the sector’s contribution to GDP from SAR 64 billion (about USD 17 billion) in 2024 to SAR 240 billion (about USD 64 billion) by 2030, while creating 200,000 to 250,000 direct and indirect jobs. The contribution of mining to overall non-oil GDP, currently in low single digits, would lift toward 5 to 6 percent on plan, feeding into the broader non-oil GDP growth trajectory tracked by Vision 2030.
Three operational levers underpin the target. First, exploration: the Ministry deployed roughly USD 300 million in exploration spending in 2024, a fivefold increase since 2020, and the count of active exploration companies grew from six in 2020 to 226 by mid-2025, holding 702 active licences. The Ministry issued 736 new mining licences in 2025 alone, including 479 exploration permits, 127 building-materials quarry licences, 61 small mining and quarry exploitation rights, 52 prospecting licences, and 17 surplus minerals titles, marking a 220 percent year-on-year jump in mining-exploitation licence issuance. Second, downstream processing: the Kingdom has set itself the goal of becoming one of the world’s seven largest mineral processing hubs by 2030, anchored on Ras Al-Khair, Wa’ad Al Shamal, and a planned third metals city near Yanbu. Third, capital deployment: the February 2025 announcement of a USD 100 billion investment plan for the mining sector through 2030 set out commitments across exploration, processing, downstream metallurgy, and overseas equity stakes. The plan pairs Ministry spending with co-funded exploration grants for private operators, designed to compress the discovery curve in untested districts where junior explorers have historically borne all geological risk.
International Investment Opportunities
Saudi Arabia has fully opened the mining sector to foreign capital. Foreign companies won approximately 35 percent of mining licences awarded in 2025. The cohort of international entrants includes Australian, Canadian, South African, Chinese, and American mid-tier explorers, several of whom have signed exploration alliances with Ma’aden or directly bid for Ministry licence rounds. The competitive cost structure, sub-USD 30 per megawatt-hour industrial power tariffs, the absence of a federal income tax for non-listed entities below threshold, and the proximity to European and Asian smelting markets via the Suez Canal and Red Sea ports together create a viable alternative to Latin American and African frontier jurisdictions.
The annual Future Minerals Forum, launched in 2022 and held each January at the King Abdulaziz International Conference Centre in Riyadh, has become the principal mining gathering for the Africa, Middle East, and Central Asia super-region. The 2025 edition drew 18,000 participants from 165 countries, hosted 405 speakers, and facilitated 126 agreements with a combined headline value of SAR 107 billion across exploration, research and development, and sustainability. Major announcements included the Aramco-Ma’aden lithium and transition-metals joint venture, Ma’aden’s gold and copper exploration discoveries, the Hadeed steel expansion at SAR 25 billion, and a Baosteel commitment to build its first overseas integrated steel plant in the Kingdom. The fifth edition runs 13 to 15 January 2026 under the theme “Dawn of a Global Cause.”
Manara Minerals and Overseas Strategy
Manara Minerals, a 50/50 joint venture established in January 2023 between Ma’aden and the Public Investment Fund, is the vehicle for overseas equity participation in critical-mineral assets. The vehicle’s mandate is to take minority stakes in producing and near-producing copper, nickel, iron ore, lithium, and rare earth assets that the Kingdom cannot replicate domestically at scale, while opening offtake corridors back to Saudi processing capacity.
Manara closed its first major transaction in mid-2024, paying USD 2.5 billion for a 10 percent equity interest in Vale Base Metals Limited, the holding entity for Vale’s energy-transition metals portfolio covering copper and nickel assets across Brazil, Canada, and Indonesia. In 2024-2025, Manara entered exclusive negotiations with the Government of Pakistan to acquire between 10 and 20 percent of the Reko Diq copper-gold project, the Barrick-operated, USD 9 billion development in Balochistan, with the stake structured in two tranches, 10 percent at signing and a further 5 percent at final investment decision. Talks with First Quantum Minerals to acquire 15 to 20 percent of its Zambian copper and nickel operations, valued between USD 1.5 billion and USD 2 billion, advanced through 2024. PIF and Ma’aden have additionally explored a USD 3 billion African platform spanning the Democratic Republic of Congo and other jurisdictions, and Manara is structuring a metals trading arm to monetise volume flows across its portfolio. In January 2026, AGBI reported that PIF intends to spin Manara out of its pure-investor structure into an operator capable of taking control positions in select assets.
The Manara strategy mirrors the playbook used by Japanese trading houses and Chinese state miners over the prior two decades: minority equity for security of supply, offtake rights into domestic processing, and gradual escalation toward operatorship where the asset and host jurisdiction permit. For the Kingdom, the route compresses the time to integrated supply security from twenty years of greenfield exploration to roughly five years of equity acquisitions plus brownfield expansion at home.
Infrastructure Development
Mining requires bulk-handling infrastructure that sits well outside the historic Saudi industrial footprint. The North-South Railway, completed in stages between 2010 and 2017 and operated by Saudi Arabia Railways, links the phosphate basin around Al Jalamid and Wa’ad Al Shamal with the Ras Al-Khair processing complex on the Arabian Gulf, a 1,400-kilometre dedicated freight corridor capable of moving 5 million tonnes per year of bulk phosphate and additional volumes of bauxite. Road upgrades to the Mahd Ad Dhahab, Ad Duwayhi, and Mansourah-Massarah gold complexes have been completed under Vision 2030 capital programmes, and dedicated mining ports at Ras Al-Khair on the east coast and Yanbu on the Red Sea handle export volumes.
Wa’ad Al Shamal, meaning “Promise of the North,” is the model integrated mining city. Built around the phosphate basin, the city aggregates power generation, desalinated water from a dedicated pipeline, worker housing, schools, healthcare, and rail and road links into a single permitted site. Replicating that model, the Ministry and the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu are scoping a similar metals city near Yanbu to anchor copper smelting, rare earth separation, and battery-precursor manufacturing as those value chains move from feasibility into construction.
Risks and Challenges
The development pathway is not without friction. Many priority deposits sit in remote terrain in the northern Hejaz, the Najd, or the Empty Quarter, where infrastructure is sparse and operating costs run higher than published feasibility numbers initially suggest. Water is the binding constraint for most processing options, and mineral processing at scale will compete with municipal and agricultural demand unless powered by reverse-osmosis desalination tied to the Kingdom’s renewable build-out.
The skilled-labour gap is real. Ma’aden, junior explorers, and contractors compete for a small pool of Saudi mining engineers, geologists, metallurgists, and underground supervisors, and Saudisation targets sit alongside an explicit policy preference for technology transfer through expatriate hiring. Universities including King Abdulaziz, KFUPM, and King Saud have expanded mining and geological engineering programmes, but the lag from enrolment to operating-mine experience is measured in years.
Environmental and social licence requirements have tightened. The Ministry, in coordination with the National Centre for Environmental Compliance, now requires environmental and social impact assessments, mine-closure planning, water management plans, and community engagement protocols broadly comparable to International Finance Corporation Performance Standards. Mining operations also have to fit inside the Kingdom’s net-zero by 2060 commitment, which constrains energy choices for smelting and pushes operators toward renewable power purchase agreements, electrified haulage, and carbon-capture-ready process design.
Commodity-price exposure is the cyclical risk. Ma’aden’s 2025 result was flattered by firm gold and DAP fertiliser prices alongside record volumes; a sustained pullback in either commodity would compress margins and slow the funding of growth capital expenditure. Geopolitical exposure on overseas Manara assets adds another layer: Reko Diq sits in Balochistan, the Vale Base Metals portfolio includes Indonesian nickel exposure, and Zambia’s fiscal regime has shifted twice in the prior cycle. The mining strategy therefore depends on portfolio diversification across commodities, geographies, and value-chain stages rather than concentration in any single asset.
Outlook to 2030
By 2030, the visible delivery markers are tractable. Mining sector GDP must scale from roughly SAR 64 billion to SAR 240 billion, requiring annualised real growth in the high teens that is consistent with current licensing momentum. Gold production has a clear pathway from 400,000 ounces today through 700,000 ounces by 2028 and toward 1 million ounces by 2030 if Mansourah-Massarah, Ad Duwayhi expansions, and the next exploration cohort convert to production on schedule. Phosphate fertiliser output is targeted to rise above 9 million tonnes per year as the Wa’ad Al Shamal complex completes its third phase. Copper output should approach 200,000 tonnes per year between Jabal Sayid, the Khnaiguiyah development, and any additional discoveries. The Aramco-Ma’aden lithium joint venture, with first commercial production targeted for 2027, would put the Kingdom into the global battery-supply conversation just as Western OEMs are scrambling for non-Chinese feedstock.
Mining will not displace hydrocarbons in fiscal terms by 2030, and that is not the design objective. The case for the sector is structural: it monetises geological assets the country already owns, draws on existing engineering and project-management capacity, integrates with downstream metals manufacturing under Saudi Arabia’s broader economic diversification push, and generates exportable value-added products. Combined with the Manara overseas portfolio, the Kingdom is positioning to become a structurally important supplier of phosphate fertiliser, refined gold, primary aluminium, copper concentrate, and battery-grade lithium by the back end of the decade. That position, rather than the headline trillion-dollar valuation, is the metric by which Saudi mining will be judged.
Three watch items will determine whether the headline numbers convert into durable industrial capacity. The first is the rate at which exploration licences move through the discovery-to-resource-to-reserve pipeline; high licence counts without commensurate drilling intensity and resource statements would suggest activity rather than progress. The second is foreign direct investment quality: Saudi Arabia needs not only capital but technical expertise embedded in operating teams, which means tracking the share of senior technical roles held by experienced mine builders rather than headline investment values. The third is downstream conversion: the Ras Al-Khair, Wa’ad Al Shamal, and prospective Yanbu metals city programmes have to absorb domestic concentrate output and produce refined metals at internationally competitive cost, otherwise the Kingdom risks becoming a concentrate exporter rather than the integrated metals hub described in policy documents. The licensing momentum, the Ma’aden delivery record, the Manara deal flow, and the Aramco-led lithium pilot together suggest the trajectory is real, but the next four years are where promise has to convert into operating tonnes.
External References
- Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources - licensing data, sector strategy, and Future Minerals Forum announcements.
- USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries - international benchmarking of phosphate, bauxite, and rare earth reserves.
- Reuters mining coverage - Manara Minerals deal flow and Ma’aden quarterly results.
- Mining Weekly - operational updates from Jabal Sayid, Reko Diq, and Future Minerals Forum coverage.
- Arab Gulf Business Insight - Manara spinoff plans, Zambia talks, and broader Gulf mining strategy.
- Bloomberg energy and commodities - LME price context for aluminium, copper, and gold relevant to Ma’aden margins.