The Spark: Perth, 1992 🔬
BHP geologists fused Soviet-era maps 🗺️ with fresh satellite imagery 📡 and punched ten holes into the Chagai Hills.
Hole RD-10 hit 170 m of 2 % copper 🟠 and 0.3 g/t gold 🟡.
Resource declared: Reko Diq today the richest undeveloped copper-gold orebody on Earth, USD $6–8 trillion of metal in situ.
The Muscle: Xi’an, 2025 🚧
China Railway Tunnel Bureau’s 15 m-diameter TBMs 🚇, hard-rock behemoths that chew through 250 MPa quartz-monzonite like wet concrete, will bore twin 12 km declines beneath the future open pit.
The result: over 50% more payable metal, accessed without another metre of skyline-high wall.
The Grit: Chagai, 2028 to 2045 ⛏️
4,000 Baloch miners 👷♂️, 500 Pakistani engineers 👩🔧, and Lahore-built 360-tonne haulers 🚚 will deliver 460,000 tonnes of copper and 520,000 ounces of gold each year for 37 years.
Power will come from solar-battery microgrids ☀️🔋.
Water will be drawn from saline aquifers and recycled in a closed-loop system ♻️.
The Payoff: Detroit to Denver, 2030 onwards 🏙️
Every tonne of Reko Diq copper that lands at Port Houston replaces scrap stolen from construction sites, ending the US $1 billion-a-year copper theft economy 🛡️.
Gold from the same ore will plate the high-speed connectors in EV chargers, grid inverters, and maglev switches, cutting public transport capital costs by up to 18% and electrifying 25,000 km of commuter rail 🚊.
The Global Loop: Australia ➝ China ➝ Pakistan ➝ America
🇦🇺 Australia discovered the treasure trove.
🇨🇳 China provides the machines that unlock its full scale.
🇵🇰 Pakistan brings the geology, operational labor, and engineering to life.
🇺🇸 The United States is likely to be the largest downstream beneficiary. Reko Diq copper will:
- Power EVs 🚗, wind turbines 🌬️, and electric grids ⚡ across America’s reindustrialization drive
- Stabilize copper supply and eliminate petty theft
- Enable cheaper, electrified public transport 🚇 from Los Angeles to Detroit
Final Thought
While Aussie inventions like Wi-Fi 📶 and the black-box ✈️ live in textbooks, a single Perth-forged drill may soon be threading the next industrial system of the US.
Reko Diq may be Pakistan’s land. But its extraction is a global choreography initiated by Aussie geologists, accelerated by Chinese tech, grounded by Pakistani grit, and destined to electrify American steel, cities, and semiconductors.
