Why Pakistan Is Under-Explored Compared to Chile and Peru (And What That Means for Anyone Paying Attention)

Chile spent roughly $720 million on mineral exploration in 2023. Pakistan spent under $20 million. Same planet, same rocks, wildly different numbers.

I keep coming back to this stat because it explains almost everything wrong (and everything exciting) about mining in this country. We're sitting on what the government estimates at $6 trillion in mineral wealth. And yet, when a Canadian junior wants to drill, nine out of ten times they're booking a flight to Santiago, not Islamabad.

Why?

The Geology Argument Doesn't Hold Up

First, let me kill the easy excuse. People say Chile and Peru are richer because the Andes are somehow geologically special. They're not — at least not in a way that excludes us.

The Chagai belt in Balochistan is part of the same Tethyan magmatic arc that produced Reko Diq. That arc runs from Turkey through Iran, into Pakistan, and continues all the way to Indonesia. It's the same family of porphyry copper-gold systems that built the Chilean economy. Reko Diq alone has reserves comparable to some of the largest deposits in the Atacama. Saindak has been producing copper since 2003.

And that's just one belt. The Himalayan suture zone running through Gilgit-Baltistan hosts pegmatites that are geochemically similar to the lithium-bearing pegmatites of Brazil's Minas Gerais. The Muslim Bagh ophiolite produces some of the highest-grade chromite on earth — 58% Cr2O3 in places, which is better than most Albanian or Turkish ore.

So the rocks aren't the problem. Honestly, in some belts our rocks are better. The problem is what's happened on top of them for the last fifty years.

What Chile Did That We Didn't

Chile started taking exploration seriously in the 1970s. They built SERNAGEOMIN (their geological survey), digitized their geological maps, ran nationwide airborne magnetic and gravity surveys, and — this is the part nobody talks about — they made the data public and free.

A junior explorer in Vancouver can sit down tonight, pull Chilean geophysical data, overlay it with concession boundaries, and identify three drill targets before breakfast. Try doing that for Khuzdar or Chitral. The data either doesn't exist, exists in a filing cabinet in Quetta, or costs more than a small drill program to access.

Peru followed Chile's playbook in the 1990s with INGEMMET. Result: Peru went from a marginal mining country to the world's second-largest copper producer. They didn't find new geology. They mapped what was already there and let the market do the rest.

We haven't done that. The Geological Survey of Pakistan does excellent work with the resources it has, but a nationwide modern gravity survey? A complete airborne mag coverage at 200m line spacing? Public ASTER-derived alteration maps? Most of that simply doesn't exist for Pakistan at the resolution Chile considers standard.

This is the gap GeoMine AI was built to fill, by the way. We can't wait another twenty years for a government survey. So we're using Sentinel-2, ASTER, SAR, and SRTM data — combined with our own models — to generate the kind of regional alteration and structural maps that Chilean explorers take for granted. It's not a replacement for ground geophysics. But it's a starting point that didn't exist five years ago.

The Security and Perception Tax

Look, I'm not going to pretend Balochistan is Antofagasta. It isn't. Security concerns, insurgency in parts of the province, and federal-provincial royalty disputes (Reko Diq itself was tied up in litigation for over a decade) have scared off serious capital.

But here's the thing — Peru in the 1990s had Sendero Luminoso blowing up power lines near mine sites. Colombia had FARC. Both countries are now major exploration destinations. Security isn't permanent. Reputation is the harder problem.

I talk to investors in Dubai and London almost every week. The first question is never about geology. It's always: "Can I actually get my equipment in and my concentrate out?" That's a logistics and policy question, not a rock question. And it's the question Chile answered forty years ago.

What's Actually Changing

A few things, and they're moving faster than most people realize.

Reko Diq is back in development with Barrick. The Special Investment Facilitation Council is fast-tracking mining approvals — I've seen permit timelines drop from 18 months to under 6 for some projects in 2024. Saudi Arabia's Manara Minerals is in active talks for stakes in Pakistani copper assets. And the federal government finally pushed through a unified mineral policy framework in 2023 that gives provinces clearer revenue-sharing rules.

On the data side, satellite-based exploration has changed what "under-explored" even means. Twenty years ago, under-explored meant nobody had walked the ground. Today, I can run a regional alteration analysis on 50,000 square kilometers of Chagai in about a week. The bottleneck isn't finding targets anymore. It's getting drill rigs to them.

I used to think Pakistan's mining problem was geological awareness — that we just needed to prove the rocks were there. I was wrong. The rocks are well-documented in academic literature going back to the 1960s. The problem was always access: access to data, access to permits, access to capital, access to the actual ground. Three of those four are improving right now.

The fourth one — capital — follows the other three. Always has.

So when someone asks me why a junior explorer should look at Pakistan instead of just adding another property in the Atacama, my honest answer is: because the Atacama is picked over and Pakistan isn't. Every porphyry in Chile has been walked, sampled, and modeled by three generations of geologists. The Chagai has been walked by maybe two serious teams in fifty years.

That's not a disadvantage. That's the opportunity.

When does the rest of the market figure it out?