Inside the Eastern Desert concession testing Egypt’s mining ambitions
The Pharaohs did it. So did the Romans. Walk through parts of the Eastern Desert, and the evidence stares you in the face if you know what to look for — cut marks, sometimes accompanied by soot, that mark the location of artisanal mines. Fly over the vast rock-and-sand expanse, and you can literally map out the contours of the ancient work sites that fuelled the gold economy in Egypt from the predynastic settlements of the fourth millennium BCE through the last of the pharaohs.
Three thousand years of digging made gold the foundation of pharaonic wealth and an instrument of Egyptian power abroad that had, by the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BCE), made the kingdom the gold superpower of the late Bronze Age. Foreign kings wrote the pharaoh complaining that gold was as plentiful in Egypt as dust. Little wonder, then, that the world’s oldest-known geological map was drawn under Ramesses IV some time around 1150 BCE.
With the passage of time, the veins the pharaohs worked were abandoned, not exhausted — and the Sisi administration is today rolling out the welcome mat for mining companies both foreign and domestic. On offer: A new regulatory and business environment for mining that some industry players tell us meets or exceeds global norms. The hope: That the reforms will draw big and small players alike to high-stakes exploration.
BY THE NUMBERS- The government hopes to launch an international tender for gold and associated minerals across more than 210 blocks in the Eastern Desert this year — its first bid round in more than four years. It follows fresh changes to the executive regulations of the Mineral Resources Law, approved by the Cabinet in April, and amendments to the mining investment law that cut the state’s minimum stake in projects from 25% to 10%.
Lower rents, faster approvals, a smaller state cut, a new aerial survey of the desert — all of it is designed to turn the nation’s solitary commercial-scale gold mine, known as Sukari, into a world-class multi-metal industry that it hopes will account for as much as 6% of GDP by the early 2030s.
To see what that looks like on the ground, we drove into the Eastern Desert near Ras Ghareb to Wadi Dara, a copper-and-gold concession held by Ankh Resources — a privately held junior explorer founded in 2021 by two veterans of Egypt’s mining and venture capital sectors. We walked the ground with the company’s geologists and investors, and sat down with its leadership: non-executive chair Timothy Livesey, consulting geologist Nick Tate, co-founders Tamer Azer and Mostafa Talaat, and exploration chief Abdelhalim Assran. Ankh aims to prove that Wadi Dara could be home to Egypt’s first globally significant copper-gold mine in modern times.
SOUND SMART- The copper angle makes Wadi Dara extra interesting. A copper-gold mine works a deposit in which gold and copper occur together in the same orebody and are recovered at the same time. The copper angle at Wadi Dara is particularly interesting — it’s one of the keys to our digital and green economies. The AI buildout runs on copper — it’s in the GPUs, busways, power-distribution units, transformers, and liquid-cooling cold plates inside data centers. It’s the key link from the solar and wind farms powering them, distributing electricity to the racks and racks of servers that “run” Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. Outside data centers, EVs need 2-4x the copper of a petrol-powered car — and the charging infrastructure they need demands more copper still.
Juniors like Ankh will be critical to any Egyptian mining boom. “It’s great to have large multinational companies operating mines in your country, but they only come in on the back of the work that’s done by the juniors,” Livesey — a UK-trained geologist whose CV runs through Anglo American, Barrick, and the Reko Diq project in Pakistan — tells us.
Juniors make some 60% of the world’s mineral discoveries. They raise equity as they go, prove (or kill) targets, and typically aim to sell the project to a major — or partner with one on production. “Egypt [needs] juniors coming in, failing fast, moving through these licenses, testing them, evaluating them, moving on to the next one — because not every license will deliver a deposit,” Livesey says. The fail-fast mantra isn’t defeatism — a junior burns investor money every day it holds ground, so a dead target should be dropped, not nursed for five years.