Mining Lease Due Diligence in Pakistan: A Satellite-First Approach to Avoid Costly Mistakes

By Sufyan · 2026-06-02 · 5 min read

Last March I almost wired 4.2 million PKR for a chromite lease in Muslim Bagh. The paperwork was clean. The seller had a stamped lease document, a survey map, and three witnesses willing to sign anything. I pulled the satellite history before the transfer. The pit shown on his "active mine site" photo was actually 3.1 km outside the lease boundary. Someone else's pit. Someone else's chromite.

That's the moment I stopped trusting paper.

Honestly, I should've known earlier. I've been buying mineral rights in Gilgit-Baltistan since 2019 and I've watched serious investors — including one Karachi-based family office that should've known better — lose money on leases that didn't contain what the seller claimed. The problem isn't fraud most of the time. It's vagueness. Boundary descriptions in older Pakistani lease documents are sometimes written like a treasure hunt. "From the white rock near the dry stream, 400 paces east." That's not me being dramatic. I have a copy of a 1998 lease that literally says that.

So here's how we actually do mining due diligence Pakistan-style at GeoMine AI now, and what I wish I'd known back when I was signing things based on vibes.

What the satellite shows that the paperwork hides

First thing we pull is the Sentinel-2 history for the coordinates. Sentinel-2 has been imaging Pakistan every 5 days since 2017, at 10-meter resolution. That archive is gold for mineral rights verification Pakistan because it shows you whether the pit, road, or camp shown in seller photos actually existed when they say it did.

A few specific things we check:

Then we overlay ASTER for the mineralogical signal. If somebody is selling you a copper lease, ASTER should at least hint at iron oxide alteration, clay zones, or some indication that the geology makes sense. If the spectral response looks like plain unaltered sediment, you're being sold a story.

SAR (we use Sentinel-1) is where it gets fun. SAR sees through cloud and dust, which matters because half of Balochistan is under cloud during monsoon months when sellers love to push deals through. But more importantly, SAR shows surface deformation. If there's recent ground movement on the site — a fresh slump, an underground working that's collapsing — SAR catches it months before you'd notice on the ground.

The lease boundary problem nobody warns you about

Here's the thing about a mining lease Pakistan transaction: the official coordinates in the lease document and the coordinates the seller walks you across on the ground are sometimes 200 to 800 meters apart. I'm not exaggerating. We've measured this on 17 of the last 23 leases we audited.

Why? Because old leases were drawn on paper maps using local landmarks, then later "digitized" by someone in a provincial office who guessed. The original landmarks — that white rock, that dry stream — are sometimes gone, or there are now three white rocks.

What we do: we take the official coordinates from the Mines & Minerals Department, plot them on a recent Sentinel-2 composite, then physically walk the boundary with a sub-meter GPS. The discrepancy report alone has killed three deals for our clients this year. One was a 47-hectare granite lease near Mansehra where the actual mineable area inside the legal boundary was 11 hectares. The rest was either riverbed or somebody else's claim.

Look, this isn't glamorous work. It's not AI predicting the next Reko Diq. It's just making sure that when you sign a paper saying you own mineral rights over a polygon, the polygon contains what you think it contains.

A short checklist before you sign anything

I'll keep this tight because most people reading this already know they should be doing more homework. They just don't know what "more" looks like specifically.

  1. Pull the Sentinel-2 archive for the lease coordinates going back at least 5 years. Look for prior disturbance, illegal mining scars, and access changes.
  2. Run an ASTER mineral map to confirm the geology supports the claimed mineral. A lithium lease in a granitic terrain that shows zero pegmatite signal is a red flag.
  3. Get the lease polygon from the provincial Mines Department directly — not from the seller. Plot it. Walk it.
  4. Check SRTM DEM for slope and accessibility. A beautiful chromite outcrop on a 62-degree slope is not a mine. It's a photo opportunity.
  5. SAR-check for ground stability and recent activity. If the seller says the site is dormant but SAR shows fresh truck tracks last week, ask why.
  6. Verify the lease isn't overlapping a protected area, a CPEC right-of-way, or a contested boundary district. This catches more deals than you'd think.

At geomines.org we package this as a single report — usually 24 to 72 hours turnaround depending on cloud cover and how far back we need to pull SAR. Not because I want to advertise (well, partly), but because the cost of one of these audits is roughly 0.3% of an average lease transaction value in Pakistan. The cost of skipping it can be 100%.

I got the Muslim Bagh chromite story wrong in my first telling, by the way. I used to blame the seller. Then I realized I'd never asked for the digitized boundary file from the department. He didn't lie to me. I just didn't check.

Which brings me back to the question I keep asking serious investors who call us before doing a deal — and the question I think every mine owner in Pakistan should ask themselves before the next transfer document gets signed: do you actually know what's inside your polygon?

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