Egypt makes move to mine lithium in desert with Spanish help
Egypt is expanding its exploration of lithium and other critical minerals in an effort to attract investment in an industry largely untouched in the country.
On Sunday, Cairo announced it had signed a deal with Spanish company X-Calibur to carry out aerial surveys for mineral exploration using specialised aircraft equipped with advanced geophysical technology.
Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Karim Badawi said the project marked Egypt’s first comprehensive airborne mining survey in over 40 years, with a government statement saying the data would “help identify investment opportunities and reduce the costs as well as risks associated with mineral exploration.”
The project is set to cover six geographic zones and encompass the country’s Eastern and Western Deserts, Sinai, and the Bahariya Oasis and Abu Tartour areas of the New Valley governorate.
A clearly mapped-out geophysical subsurface baseline is the first step in the mining process before investors and operators choose an area for exploration. Without it, experts say, the risk becomes impossible for companies to undertake.
Despite Egypt sitting atop a diverse geology of minerals, the mining sector has contributed to approximately 1% of GDP – a small contributor to the country’s wealth largely due to deficient or outdated data infrastructure.
Previous sporadic projects in the 1980s left Egypt with a patchwork of datasets scattered across multiple agencies.
Now, the government is betting that a unified, modern survey will de-risk exploration and finally put vast tracts of the desert back on the map for international miners.
Cairo has set an ambitious target of increasing the mining sector’s contribution to GDP to 6%.