With the potential to produce 200,000 tonnes of copper and 250,000 ounces of gold each year and an estimated mine life of more than half a century, the Reko Diq project ranks as one of the world’s largest untapped copper and gold resources (Emily Gosden writes). Less favourably, the ore lies in a remote, inhospitable mountainous area of Pakistan near the borders with Afghanistan and Iran, where temperatures soar to 50C in summer and plunge to -10C in winter.
Those conditions were never likely to make Reko Diq easy to develop. But back in 2011, with copper prices trading at highs around $10,000 a tonne, it looked like the estimated $3.3 billion project could be a risk worth taking. Antofagasta and Barrick, which had invested