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Aramco and Maaden announced the signing of a shareholders’ agreement that establishes a joint venture to pursue mineral exploration and hard-rock mining opportunities across the Kingdom. The partnership builds on plans first disclosed in January 2025 and sets Maaden to hold a 51 percent stake with Aramco taking the remaining 49 percent. According to the statement the venture will focus on copper as its primary target while also seeking zinc lead and rare earth elements vital for the energy transition and future industries.
Exploration activities will center on Zone-4 also known as the Transition Zone within the Arabian Platform spanning roughly 182,000 square kilometers. This zone equals nearly 10 percent of Saudi Arabia’s total land area and stretches along a 100-kilometer-wide corridor parallel to the Arabian Shield opening a significant new frontier for discovery. The announcement highlighted how the scale of the area combined with the partners’ capabilities could accelerate progress in unlocking the Kingdom’s mineral potential.
Saleh M. Al Saleh Aramco vice president of transition minerals said “Over 90 years Aramco has accumulated and analyzed the largest amount of geological and geophysical data ever acquired in a single basin for the Kingdom. This partnership intends to leverage this legacy information to find minerals in the JV area within the basin. Maaden’s expertise our people high-performance computing and AI are expected to play a pivotal role in accelerating the discovery of key transition minerals at low cost.”
Darryl Clark Maaden executive vice president for exploration said “Maaden has been advancing one of the world’s largest single jurisdiction exploration programs across the Arabian Shield to help unlock the Kingdom’s mineral potential. This joint venture would take that ambition into a new area. By combining Maaden’s exploration and development expertise with Aramco’s extraordinary knowledge of the Arabian Platform we would have an opportunity to move faster explore smarter and create new opportunities to discover the minerals that will power the energy transition.”
Copper constitutes more than 20 percent of the 1.2 trillion dollar global mined metals market and its own market is currently valued at approximately 250 billion dollars with projections to exceed 400 billion dollars by 2035 according to the announcement. The joint venture plans to deploy advanced computational algorithms artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to identify promising targets more efficiently and reduce the time from regional screening to discovery. Such tools are expected to support cost-effective exploration while contributing to the long-term expansion of Saudi Arabia’s mining sector.
The shareholders’ agreement and incorporation of the joint venture remain subject to required corporate regulatory and antitrust approvals the companies stated. This initiative aligns with Saudi Arabia’s broader economic diversification strategy in which the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources has positioned mining as a strategic pillar for sustainable growth. The partnership is anticipated to strengthen the Kingdom’s integration into global minerals value chains amid rising demand for energy transition resources.
