Reko Diq and Beyond: Pakistan's Porphyry Copper Potential from Space

Reko Diq holds an estimated 5.9 billion tonnes of ore at 0.41% copper and 0.22 g/t gold. That's not a small deposit. That's one of the ten largest undeveloped copper-gold systems on the planet, sitting in a district most of the world couldn't find on a map.

And here's what bothers me. Everyone talks about Reko Diq like it's the only porphyry in Pakistan. It isn't. Not even close.

The Chagai magmatic arc runs roughly 480 km from the Iranian border across western Balochistan. Reko Diq sits on one tiny piece of it. Saindak — the operating copper-gold mine 15 km away — sits on another. Between them and beyond them, there are at least 15 documented porphyry-style anomalies that nobody has drilled in 20 years. Some have never been drilled at all.

So when people ask me what GeoMine AI actually does, this is the honest answer: we look at the parts of Pakistan that geologists already suspected were mineralized, and we let the satellites tell us where to walk first.

What a porphyry looks like from 786 km up

Sentinel-2 orbits at 786 km. ASTER flies on Terra at 705 km. Neither of them can see copper directly. Let's get that out of the way.

What they can see is the alteration halo. Every porphyry copper system — Reko Diq, Saindak, Bingham Canyon in Utah, Escondida in Chile — leaves the same fingerprint at surface. A core of potassic alteration (biotite, K-feldspar). A phyllic zone wrapping around it (sericite, quartz, pyrite). An outer propylitic ring (chlorite, epidote, calcite). And often, an argillic cap if weathering has been heavy.

Each of those minerals reflects light differently in the shortwave infrared. ASTER's SWIR bands (especially bands 5, 6, 7, and 8) catch sericite and clay signatures around 2.2 micrometers. Iron oxide staining from oxidized pyrite shows up sharp in Sentinel-2's visible bands. Put them together, run a band ratio, and the porphyry footprint looks like a bullseye on the screen.

I'm simplifying. Field geologists who read this will roll their eyes a little. But the principle holds — and it works.

The belt nobody's mapping properly

Look at the Chagai arc on a geological map and you'll see something interesting. The known deposits — Reko Diq, Saindak, Dasht-e-Kain, Buseri Dor, Nokchah — all sit along the same Late Cretaceous to Miocene intrusive trend. The mineralization is tied to subduction-related calc-alkaline magmatism, same family of rocks that produced the Andean copper belt.

But the arc doesn't stop at Reko Diq. It continues northwest into Iran (where the Sar Cheshmeh mine produces around 200,000 tonnes of copper a year) and it bends through Balochistan into areas like Raskoh and Western Makran where, honestly, the satellite signatures are screaming and nobody is listening.

We ran an alteration analysis last year over a 2,400 sq km block north of Kharan. Three distinct alteration centers showed up. Classic concentric pattern. Iron oxide rims, phyllic cores, the whole thing. One of them sits 38 km from the nearest road. Another is right next to a track that goat herders use.

I'd bet money two of those three are real porphyry systems. The third might be epithermal — I'm less sure. But you don't know until somebody puts a drill on it.

Why this matters beyond Balochistan

Porphyry copper isn't only a Chagai story. The Kohistan Island Arc in the north — the same belt that hosts the Jijal and Kamila ultramafics — has documented copper-gold prospects at Dassu, Jijal, and several spots near Chilas. The geology is different (older, more deformed), but the metal endowment is real.

I own mines in Gilgit-Baltistan. Fifteen of them. Most of my licenses are for marble, granite, and some gemstone work. But I've stood on outcrops near the Kohistan-Ladakh suture where the gossan staining is so red it looks painted. That's oxidized sulfides. That's a target.

And then there's the Waziristan ophiolite belt — chromite country, mostly — but with copper showings at places like Boya and Datta Khel that have never been systematically explored with modern remote sensing.

What the data won't tell you

Look, satellite data has limits. I got this wrong early on. I used to think a strong alteration signature plus a magnetic anomaly was basically a guaranteed deposit. It's not.

Cover is the enemy. If a porphyry sits under 30 meters of alluvium, ASTER won't see it. The alteration is there, the copper is there, but the surface is just gravel and sand. This is why parts of the Chagai are so frustrating — the topography hides as much as it reveals.

Second problem: false positives. Hydrothermal alteration doesn't always mean copper. Sometimes it means a barren epithermal system, or a fossil geothermal field, or just a weird weathering pattern in a felsic intrusion. The satellites narrow your search from 100,000 sq km to maybe 500. Boots, hammers, and assays do the rest.

And third — and this is the one that keeps Pakistani exploration stuck — even when you have a beautiful target, the licensing pathway in Balochistan is brutal. Reko Diq itself spent 13 years in international arbitration before the current Barrick-led structure got finalized in 2022. Most juniors don't have that kind of patience or capital.

So when I tell investors there are probably 8 to 12 undiscovered porphyry systems in Pakistan worth more than a billion dollars each, the discovery isn't the hard part anymore. Satellites have made the discovery part almost cheap.

The hard part is everything that comes after the red dot on the map. Who do you talk to in Quetta? How long is your security budget? Can you actually get a rig to the site?

Those questions don't have satellite answers.