RIYADH: Saudi oil giant Aramco and mining firm Maaden have agreed to establish a joint venture focused on mineral exploration across nearly 10 percent of the Kingdom’s total land area.
Expected to be owned 51 percent by Maaden and 49 percent by Aramco, the newly announced joint venture will focus on copper and other minerals critical to the energy transition, building on plans first announced in January 2025, according to a statement.
It will explore Zone-4, also known as the Transition Zone, within the Arabian Platform. Covering about 182,000 sq. kilometers, nearly 10 percent of Saudi Arabia’s total land area, the zone extends along a 100-km-wide area parallel to the Arabian Shield.
The Kingdom’s mineral wealth is estimated at more than SR9.3 trillion ($2.5 trillion), and Saudi Arabia has identified extracting copper, gold and rare earth elements as part of its efforts to diversify the economy under Vision 2030, while aiming to increase mining’s contribution to gross domestic product to SR240 billion.
“Over 90 years, Aramco has accumulated and analyzed the largest amount of geological and geophysical data ever acquired in a single basin for the Kingdom. This partnership intends to leverage this legacy information to find minerals in the JV area within the basin,” Saleh Al-Saleh, Aramco vice president of transition minerals, said.
He added: “Maaden’s expertise, our people, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence are expected to play a pivotal role in accelerating the discovery of key transition minerals at low cost.”
Aramco, Maaden combine expertise
Maaden Executive Vice President for Exploration, Darryl Clark, said his company has been advancing one of the world’s largest single jurisdiction exploration programs across the Arabian Shield to help unlock the Kingdom’s mineral potential.
“This joint venture would take that ambition into a new area. By combining Maaden’s exploration and development expertise with Aramco’s extraordinary knowledge of the Arabian Platform, we would have an opportunity to move faster, explore smarter, and create new opportunities to discover the minerals that will power the energy transition,” Clark added.
As part of efforts to expand exploration and develop domestic mineral value chains, the Saudi government put 50,000 sq. km forward for mineral exploration in 2025, according to the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources.
