Faiza Tehseen

The 15 years extension in the lease contract of the Saindak Copper Gold Project will boost revenue of both the federal and provincial governments, enabling them to spend more on the welfare of the people. Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) of China has been running the project on lease since 2001, providing thousands of direct and indirect jobs.

The extension in lease period till 2037 was approved in February this year. Saindak Metals Limited (SML), a wholly-owned Pakistani government entity, is responsible for managing affairs of the project in the district Chagai of Balochistan.

Yasir Shaheen Khalil, an assistant director at the Geological Survey of Pakistan (GSP), told WealthPK that Saindak is a tier-1 resource of copper and gold having a cluster of south, north and east ore bodies.

Yasir Khalil, who has been working on porphyry copper-gold deposits of Chagai since 2014, maintained that the south ore body, according to its first open-pit mining design, was near exhaustion in 2020 though it can be made productive again by changing the mining design. “The north ore body, which was operationalised in 2018, is being mined at full capacity. While the east ore body will be operationalised fully during the current year.”

He said that the east ore body of copper and gold in Saindak is a multi-million-dollar project. Yasir Khalil stated that Saindak is the largest project of copper and gold mining in Pakistan. “It was first discovered in 1961 by GSP. In 1972, a team of geologists assigned by the United States Geological Survey worked on it for further appraisal. But it was not until 1995 that proper exploitation and all open-pit mining designs were developed by SML and MCC.”

He said that Pakistan is blessed with vast resources of copper and associated gold, silver and molybdenum in the form of porphyry copper deposits (PCDs). "The PCDs are widely distributed in the Chagai district, where they are known to occur in more than 50 locations. Some of these include the tier-1 resource of Reko Diq, Saindak along with other less studied prospects at Koh-i-Sultan, Dasht-i-Kaine, Ziarat, Durban Chah, Siah Diq, Amuri, Ting-Dargun, etc," he added.

Like Saindak, Pakistan has large treasures of many natural sources in its crypts, waiting to be exploited. In this age of economic competition, Pakistan should formulate a policy to attract more foreign investment in the sector to tap its vast potential for economic prosperity.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk