Most mineral finds in emerging markets stall long before anyone builds a mine on them. Investors and explorers at this last month’s Egypt Mining Forum say the country's geology is sound, but what’s missing is the technical, regulatory, and financial setup to carry finds across.

The “Valley of Death” is what the industry calls the gap between discovering minerals and financing a mine, and it’s the one Egypt is aiming to close. Before lenders put money behind a find, it has to be measured and reported according to international standards. The best known is Canada’s NI 43-101, which requires a qualified geologist or engineer to sign off on how much metal is really there. The government wants mining to grow from under 1% of GDP to 5-6% by 2030, and to get there, it has raised the Mineral Resources and Mining Industries Authority’s (MRMIA) investment budget by a third from EGP 15 bn to EGP 20 bn in FY 2026/27. The goal is an industry that no longer relies on Sukari, a single commercial gold mine.

The data explorers are waiting for

Mining booms usually start with junior explorers — the small firms that search untested ground for new deposits and take on the early risk. They made about 60% of the world’s mineral discoveries over the decade to 2019, according to MinEx Consulting. What they need most is accurate geophysical data. The better the data, the less money they sink into holes that turn up nothing.

That’s what Egypt’s first nationwide aerial survey in 42 years is meant to provide. The government hired Spain’s Xcalibur Smart Mapping to run the USD 60 mn survey, due by end-2027. CEO Andrés Blanco tells EnterpriseAM the company is waiting on final approvals and permits, which it hopes to get “before end of year.” Once they come through, the program can launch within 30-45 days.

The survey starts wide, then narrows: Xcalibur will scan the whole country for gravity and magnetic anomalies, then fly high-resolution electromagnetic surveys over the most promising areas. Pairing the data with AI will speed up decisions on where to drill, Blanco says. He sees Egypt’s Nubian Shield as an extension of the mineral-rich Arabian Shield, which points to lithium and copper alongside gold.

Who pays for the data? The survey will produce the data every explorer needs, and investors don’t agree on who should cover the cost. The government should pay for it and give explorers the data at close to no cost, “because the data would cut exploration risk and pay the state back many times over,” In2Metals Chairman Naguib Sawiris told the audience at the Egypt Mining Forum.

Others disagreed. Aton Resources CEO Tonno Vahk wants the cost shared, and said Egypt shouldn’t look to Saudi Arabia, home to the Arabian Shield, as a model. The Kingdom can afford to pay for its own geological data, he said, because its mining push is backed by deep public money and isn’t purely economic.

New money, new rules

Demand is coming from across the industry. Sawiris says his companies have applied for 19 blocks, and the results are still pending. Akh Gold bid for five in June through its parent company, In2Metals. Ankh Resources also made its own bid that same month. Even Capital Limited, which drills for AngloGold Ashanti and Aton, reportedly wants nine gold blocks of its own. The juniors are raising money abroad to fund exploration: Red Sea Resources and Ankh plan to list in Toronto, in January and H2 2027. Investors say drawing in global players and getting more juniors listed would only be the beginning.

From sharing output to paying royalties: Until 2019, Egypt ran mining on a production-sharing system, taking a share of whatever a mine produced. Since the 2019-2020 reforms, companies keep their output and pay taxes and royalties instead, including a 5% royalty on gold.

The bigger change on the ground has been security, Sawiris told the audience. Over the past nine months, the army has cleared illegal miners off concession areas, which he calls “a revolution.” Illegal mining had been the biggest obstacle for junior explorers, he says, until the army decided the gold “belongs to the people of Egypt” and can’t be taken without royalties and taxes being paid. Security in remote areas matters more than anything for keeping investment stable, Vahk said, and the government’s dialogue with miners has improved a lot since 2015.

The door is now open year-round: Since last June, MRMIA has run an open-block system for gold, phosphate, talc, kaolin, and other ores. Investors can apply for any block at any time, and the first offer on a block triggers a 30-day bidding window while the rest stay open. The government is also courting Australian miners ahead of a new exploration program in the Eastern Desert.

Not all the ground is in play: State companies such as Shalateen Mineral Resources hold promising concessions for years without developing them or opening them for partners, Sawiris says. Shalateen’s charter keeps it on the old production-sharing model and it offers its areas on its own platform rather than MRMIA’s open tender. Sawiris is hoping for a hard deadline, with private investors ready to step in as partners, because ground left idle earns nothing. Shalateen did not respond to our request for comment.

Exporting rock vs. building the plant

Processing is where the value leaks out. Egypt holds the ore for plenty of minerals it still imports in finished form — it buys more than USD 200 mn a year of silicomanganese for its steel and heavy industry, at around USD 900 a ton, even as it sits on the manganese to make the alloy itself, Assistant Industry Minister for Strategic Industries Mohamed Zada told the audience. Phosphate shows the size of the prize. Egypt holds an estimated 3.1 bn metric tons of geological phosphate reserves, the world’s third-largest, per the Petroleum Ministry — but exported raw, a ton sells for USD 70-140 depending on grade; processed into fertilizer it fetches USD 700-1k, with the World Bank’s diammonium phosphate benchmark at about USD 790 a metric ton in August. Capturing that jump, investors say, is what would lift mining’s share of GDP in a serious way. Zada says expanding local plants, drilling, and transport should let Egypt replace its silicomanganese imports within about two years before a second phase opens exports to neighbors, with a petroleum-and-industry coordinating committee linking extraction to local manufacturing.

None of that works without steady supply and infrastructure. A processing plant needs mines that can keep the ore coming, and remote mines often have to build their own power and water. Sukari Gold Mines, the joint venture that runs the Sukari gold mine, built a 36 MW solar plant with battery storage that cuts diesel use by more than 20 mn liters a year, plus a 25 km water pipeline, Vice Chair Hoda Mansour told the audience.

Even with power and water solved, the local ecosystem barely exists. Oil and gas had a century to build a network of domestic service firms; mining has two professional drilling contractors and two sample labs, Vahk says, and no local engineering-and-construction firms to build processing plants — explorers fly in international contractors one project at a time, which “increases our cost tremendously.” He gauges it takes 10-12 years to make it worth service providers’ while to stay. Skilled labor is as scarce: the industry still leans on foreign specialists and draws fewer young recruits than oil and gas or tech, Sawiris says, which is why he’s sponsoring Egypt’s Geological Museum to pull students toward the field.

How long it all takes

Sawiris thinks mining could one day out-earn Egypt’s entire oil and gas sector, though he didn’t put a number on it. For scale, petroleum product exports alone brought in about USD 2.3 bn in the first half of 2026. By MRMIA’s own math, gold and silver will bring in USD 557 mn this fiscal year, up 255%, even though gold output is set to grow just 4.9%.

The honest answer is a decade-plus. Vahk expects it to take “10 years before we see the actual benefits,” and by his count it takes juniors that long just to build out a national geological database and keep service providers in the country — a timeline the global figures echo. Operating mines take an average of 14 years to get from discovery to production, according to S&P Global. At Aton’s Abu Marawat mine, the date has already moved: the ministry had pointed to first gold in 2H 2026, but Vahk now targets early 2028, the deadline set by the company’s January 2024 mining license. The aerial survey meant to seed the next round of discoveries hasn’t started either, still waiting on permits. The government says it wants to speed things up, with the prime minister ready to offer incentives — even partnerships — to get projects into production faster, according to a cabinet statement.

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