Saudi Arabia’s latest gold discovery has led to speculation it could emerge as a major regional producer of the precious metal.
The Saudi Arabian Mining Company (Ma’aden) last week announced it found massive gold deposits in the Makkah region.
The discoveries, the first from an exploration programme launched by the company in 2022, are located along a 100km strip in the south of Ma’aden’s Mansourah-Massarah gold mine.
“The gold discovery could prove significant as the gold content of the ore is high,” Nasser Saidi, a former Lebanese economy minister and vice governor of the country’s central bank, told media.
Samples collected from two random drilling locations, located 400 metres below and adjacent to Mansourah-Massarah, revealed the existence of high-grade gold deposits, measuring 10.4 grams per tonne (g/t) and 20.6 g/t, respectively.
Higher-grade mines typically have densities of eight to 10 g/t, while lower-grade mines have densities of one to four g/t.
The higher the ore grade, the greater its value, and the extraction process becomes easier.
Mansourah-Massarah had gold resources of almost seven million ounces at the end of 2023 and production capacity of 250,000 ounces a year.
In comparison, Russia’s largest gold mine, Sukhoi Log, had reserves of 40 million ounces as of 2020. South Africa’s South Deep mine has about 32.8 million ounces of gold reserves.
When it comes to production, the Nevada Gold Mines complex in the US is the largest, with an annual production of about 3.3 million ounces, representing close to 3 per cent of the global gold production.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, has been looking to diversify away from crude exports by developing sectors including tourism, hospitality and finance.
Mining is also a key component of the kingdom’s drive to attract foreign direct investment as laid out in the Vision 2030 plan. It aims to more than triple the mining sector’s contribution to the nation’s economic output by the end of the decade.
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