Inside the Eastern Desert concession testing Egypt’s mining ambitions

The Pharaohs did it. So did the Romans. Walk through parts of the Eastern Desert, and the evidence stares you in the face if you know what to look for — cut marks, sometimes accompanied by soot, that mark the location of artisanal mines. Fly over the vast rock-and-sand expanse, and you can literally map out the contours of the ancient work sites that fuelled the gold economy in Egypt from the predynastic settlements of the fourth millennium BCE through the last of the pharaohs.

Three thousand years of digging made gold the foundation of pharaonic wealth and an instrument of Egyptian power abroad that had, by the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BCE), made the kingdom the gold superpower of the late Bronze Age. Foreign kings wrote the pharaoh complaining that gold was as plentiful in Egypt as dust. Little wonder, then, that the world’s oldest-known geological map was drawn under Ramesses IV some time around 1150 BCE.

With the passage of time, the veins the pharaohs worked were abandoned, not exhausted — and the Sisi administration is today rolling out the welcome mat for mining companies both foreign and domestic. On offer: A new regulatory and business environment for mining that some industry players tell us meets or exceeds global norms. The hope: That the reforms will draw big and small players alike to high-stakes exploration.

BY THE NUMBERS- The government hopes to launch an international tender for gold and associated minerals across more than 210 blocks in the Eastern Desert this year — its first bid round in more than four years. It follows fresh changes to the executive regulations of the Mineral Resources Law, approved by the Cabinet in April, and amendments to the mining investment law that cut the state’s minimum stake in projects from 25% to 10%.

Lower rents, faster approvals, a smaller state cut, a new aerial survey of the desert — all of it is designed to turn the nation’s solitary commercial-scale gold mine, known as Sukari, into a world-class multi-metal industry that it hopes will account for as much as 6% of GDP by the early 2030s.

To see what that looks like on the ground, we drove into the Eastern Desert near Ras Ghareb to Wadi Dara, a copper-and-gold concession held by Ankh Resources — a privately held junior explorer founded in 2021 by two veterans of Egypt’s mining and venture capital sectors. We walked the ground with the company’s geologists and investors, and sat down with its leadership: non-executive chair Timothy Livesey, consulting geologist Nick Tate, co-founders Tamer Azer and Mostafa Talaat, and exploration chief Abdelhalim Assran. Ankh aims to prove that Wadi Dara could be home to Egypt’s first globally significant copper-gold mine in modern times.

SOUND SMART- The copper angle makes Wadi Dara extra interesting. A copper-gold mine works a deposit in which gold and copper occur together in the same orebody and are recovered at the same time. The copper angle at Wadi Dara is particularly interesting — it’s one of the keys to our digital and green economies. The AI buildout runs on copper — it’s in the GPUs, busways, power-distribution units, transformers, and liquid-cooling cold plates inside data centers. It’s the key link from the solar and wind farms powering them, distributing electricity to the racks and racks of servers that “run” Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. Outside data centers, EVs need 2-4x the copper of a petrol-powered car — and the charging infrastructure they need demands more copper still.

Juniors like Ankh will be critical to any Egyptian mining boom. “It’s great to have large multinational companies operating mines in your country, but they only come in on the back of the work that’s done by the juniors,” Livesey — a UK-trained geologist whose CV runs through Anglo American, Barrick, and the Reko Diq project in Pakistan — tells us.

Juniors make some 60% of the world’s mineral discoveries. They raise equity as they go, prove (or kill) targets, and typically aim to sell the project to a major — or partner with one on production. “Egypt [needs] juniors coming in, failing fast, moving through these licenses, testing them, evaluating them, moving on to the next one — because not every license will deliver a deposit,” Livesey says. The fail-fast mantra isn’t defeatism — a junior burns investor money every day it holds ground, so a dead target should be dropped, not nursed for five years.

Every rung on the exploration ladder costs more than the last. The sequence Ankh walked us through runs like this: First, you need to prove something is there (mapping, trenching, surface geochemistry). Next comes drilling to show mineralization continues at depth and along strike. The exploration company needs to drill tighter and deeper to build a resource you can put a number on. Only then can you produce a feasibility study showing how you’ll mine it and what you’ll earn — that’s what finally leads to a production permit or a sale.

Positive results don’t let you coast, but demand you spend more, because each stage needs to be de-risked before capital goes into the next. In a promising program, the budget can double year-on-year, which is why fundraising never stops. Ankh’s holes at Wadi Dara now average around 500 meters, and the company added a geophysics phase before committing to deeper, costlier drilling — it wants the subsurface picture first.

How geology turns into finance: International reporting codes like the Joint Ore ReservesCommittee (JORC) sort a deposit into inferred, indicated, and measured resources by ascending confidence. A tighter drill grid allows the company to talk about their site with more confidence, making the data about the site (a junior’s core proprietary asset at this stage) all the more valuable. Ankh’s team says an inferred asset is worth roughly a third of a proven one on the books.

What the maiden program shows at Wadi Dara: Ankh drilled 17 diamond-core holes totaling 6.4 km in one area at their site. Fourteen of those hit what a third-party formal reviewer defined as “significant” gold and/or copper. By current industry standards, that means at least 0.5 grams of gold per ton of rock; for copper, the comparable figure is 0.33% per ton. Ankh’s early results show the mineralized zone runs at least 600 meters wide — and, crucially, they haven’t found its edges yet — it keeps going in both directions and downward, with the deepest hole showing mineralization at 527 meters below the surface. Results were reported under the JORC Code, the international standard for disclosing drill results, and signed off by independent qualified geologists.

That’s the first-pass, or prospective drilling: Holes spaced far apart, several aimed deliberately at the edges of the system rather than its sweet spots, which is why 14 of 17 counts as encouraging. Even two misses did useful work, drilled where surface data said the zone should continue at depth, but found nothing. That’s the puzzle of the Eastern Desert’s ancient geology — a fault can shift a mineralized zone a few meters or several kilometers, and the job is to work out which way before investing into further drilling.

Ultimately, exploration companies are data collection companies, so there’s more drilling to be done: What’s been drilled covers a small fraction of the roughly 4 km stretch where surface work suggests mineralization. Ankh has yet to explore an entire second target — and the valley floor between the two could itself hold plenty of gold and copper.

Back to money — and discipline. Phase two exploration will see Ankh’s team chasing the edges of the first area it is exploring (they’re calling it “Area A”), drilling the untouched Area B and the valley, and — most important and most expensive — drilling between existing holes to increase the accuracy of the data by reducing the space between drill holes from 200m to 100m, then to 50 and 25. A tighter grid is what turns “we think there’s a deposit here” into a formal resource estimate that bank or buyer will find attractive; accuracy and confidence get a boost with every hole drilled.

The plan is flexible by design: Assran, the lead geologist, is a legend in the regional industry. He and his team redraw their drilling plan as each batch of lab results returns, because a rigid plan wastes meters, and meters are money. Ankh will test the valley floor — loose material with no rock structure to read — with reverse-circulation (RC) drilling, which smashes rock into chips for chemistry, saving the slower, pricier diamond core for ground where reading the rock pays. Drilling cores preserves the rock’s structure and lets geologists model the ore body in three dimensions — as one geologist puts it, core is the DNA test, RC is the blood panel.

The elephant in the room for original investors is dilution: They need to raise capital over and over to keep exploration going. Existing investors are diluted with every raise (unless they participate in the round) and the cost of exploration often rises with subsequent phases. Asked whether shareholders push back on raises, Talaat, one of Ankh’s co-founders, says the strategy is to find a “sweet spot” between dilution and valuation. It’s a bargain that’s re-examined every year: “Don’t rush to take big money early just because it’s offered — let drill results re-rate the company first, then raise,” he says.

Livesey likens it to a snowball rolling down hill: Early success brings investors who fund drilling, which brings more success — and it only works if good (externally validated) results keep coming.

Who’s backing Ankh? Early on, it was primarily Egyptian angel investors with no mining background — their due diligence, Talaat says, was on the people rather than the rocks. Now, investors include family offices inside and outside Egypt, individual mining specialists, and institutional money listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The competition for capital in mining is global: Investors in the industry can put their money anywhere in the world, Livesey notes — what they’re buying is a team spending it wisely to de-risk.

Wadi Dara is at a stage known as “early advanced” exploration — past proof of concept and now building what the industry calls a “resource.” That’s a standard industry definition that means there’s “reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction.” One advantage the team kept coming back to on two visits earlier this summer is that the site was never torn up by artisanal mining, so the surface indicators that guide drill targeting are intact. An on-site storage facility they call the “core yard” preserves every sample Ankh has drilled since day one, split, logged, and stored so any doubter (or acquirer) can re-assay it. You can think of it as a 3D map of the site you can physically touch.

Livesey’s timeline from here is 18-24 months of expanded drilling to define a maiden resource. Feasibility, the gateway to a production permit, is “at least” three to four years out, results permitting, one company official tells us. Egypt’s licensing fits that clock. As Ankh describes it: Exploration contracts run six years with a two-year technical extension available for large discoveries, renewable two years at a time with ministry approval for companies meeting their obligations.

How easy is it to convince investors to pile money into Ankh? Investors with mining backgrounds get the geology fast, Talaat says. What they really have questions about is the jurisdiction — Egypt. How stable is the mining act? Has an operating company ever been “interrupted?” Are other investors showing up?

Egypt’s best exhibit is Sukari, which has run through three revolutions untouched — the strongest contract-sanctity signal a frontier jurisdiction can send, despite a rocky start in the late 1990s and 2000s before it turned productive.

The reform record backs it: The 2014 Mineral Resources Law was amended in 2019, and the 2020 executive regulations scrapped mandatory profitsharing JVs and capped royalties at 20% — key changes that brought Egyptian law into step with global mining-industry norms. More changes earlier this year added portal-based applications and assay-lab licensing. Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister Karim Badawi has told parliament mining contributes around 0.5% of GDP today and wants to see that hit 6% by 2030. And the ministry has taken the show on the road, with conferences, investor events, and a national airborne survey, the country’s first in four decades.

The cautionary tale is from Laos. Nick Tate — an Australian geologist consulting for Ankh and who has pop-star status in the field — spent 15 years there during what looked like a mining boom built on newly enacted legislation and hungry juniors. Then the government froze licensing, redrafted the law with outside help, and botched the implementation. (Tate is credited with the reinterpretations that expanded proven copper-gold reserves at the Sepon mine, now one of Asia’s biggest.)

The killer, he told us, was undermining what’s called the “right to mine” — the principle that an explorer who follows the rules and finds a deposit is guaranteed the license to mine it. “It’s the equivalent of a lottery ticket,” he says. “There's an implicit government guarantee that should those numbers come up, you will be paid.” Laos rewrote the terms and conditions on the back of the ticket to say “we’ll think about it,” and juniors and majors alike walked away. The mines that existed are winding down with nothing in the pipeline behind them, and public debt hit roughly 128% of GDP as the currency collapsed.

Egypt’s reforms moved decisively the opposite way, but Tate’s point is that the law on paper matters less than whether the state keeps honoring it for a decade or more. It’s a message that investors in every sector keep telling the Madbouly government: Policy stability is key.

Egypt has competition from Saudi Arabia, which sits on the same Arabian-Nubian Shield as Egypt. The ANS, as it’s known, is one of the last great frontiers in mining. Livesey rates Egypt an easier entry than Saudi Arabia is today — the Kingdom’s bid-round terms carry capital requirements that sit awkwardly with companies that, by design, have no revenue. And Egypt, Talaat adds, doesn’t nudge foreigners toward local partners the way Saudi’s system does in practice.

So what does the exit look like for Ankh? There are three doors, all requiring a code-compliant resource first. Sell the project or company to a major — the classic junior endgame, and why Ankh keeps its data room permanently ready. (When AngloGold Ashanti bought Sukari owner Centamin in November 2024, it walked into archives of preserved drill cores going back to day zero, the diligence asset that makes an acquisition underwriteable.) Ankh could also list on a stock exchange — it’s domiciled in Jersey precisely to keep a future IPO on the table. Or it could opt to build the mine itself, the longest and most capital-hungry road that opens to it only after it proves feasibility and obtains permits.

The prize looks something like Sukari: More than 5.9 mn oz produced since 2009, including roughly 500k oz in 2025, and a workforce Talaat calls “the school of mines of Egypt” — the talent pool that powered one of Ankh’s founders and now exports geologists to Oman, Saudi, and as far as Australia and Canada. Tate’s Laos warning applies here too: when a country’s pipeline dies, the gold stays in the ground but the skills scatter — and they don't come back. Egypt’s recent regulatory reform addresses that warning.

What’s next? The 2H 2026 bid round is the event to watch — both for who shows up (the 2020 and 2022 rounds drew majors, juniors, and local money, including Naguib Sawiris’ AKH Gold) and for the terms on offer. Ankh says it will look at expanding its footprint near its existing ground. Further out sits Sinai, geologically rich, but closed to precious-metals exploration until the state itself offers it. And watch the tender’s fine print for one thing above all, per the people we spoke with: Whether Egypt’s version of the lottery ticket keeps its guarantee printed on the back.

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