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has contributed to approximately 1% of GDP – a small contributor to the country’s wealth largely due to deficient or outdated data infrastructure.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%. Exploration of rare minerals The new focus comes at a time when global demand for critical minerals and battery metals continues to be acute amid unpredictable energy trends and supply shocks .
The US-Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have put serious strain on the accessibility and costs of several key commodities, sharpening competition for alternative supply routes and new sources of strategic raw materials.
Egypt’s Eastern Desert has traditionally been associated with copper, zinc and gold, and although the country has a history of gold mining dating back to the ancient pharaohs, its wider mineral wealth remains largely underdeveloped.
Today, officials are eyeing a broader suite of so-called critical minerals – including lithium, rare earth elements, nickel, cobalt and graphite – that are essential for electric vehicles, renewable energy technologies and advanced electronics.
Recent moves by Cairo come with the assumption that Egypt has prospective lithium geology worth mapping. Lithium is particularly prized as a key component of rechargeable batteries, making it central to the global energy transition and a potential strategic asset for any country able to produce it at scale.
Earlier in January, on the sidelines of the Future Minerals Forum, Badawi met with global energy technology company SLP to begin an assessment of lithium potential and its extraction in Egypt, as well as conducting new pilot tests in the Eastern Desert.
Coupled with the X-Calibur survey, the move signals that Cairo is no longer treating lithium and other rare minerals as a speculative add-on, but as a core part of its long-term resource strategy.
Over the past few years, Cairo has introduced a series of reforms aimed at making the mining sector more competitive on a global scale, including changes to licensing terms, revenue-sharing mechanisms and regulations intended to streamline investment procedures.
Officials hope that pairing regulatory reform with new geological data will be enough to lure major international operators into frontier exploration blocks.
The X-Calibur agreement also comes ahead of the Egypt Mining Forum in September, which will be key in translating the current momentum into concrete investment commitments.
Set to take place on 28–29 September in the New Administrative Capital, the forum will focus on “unlocking the exploration potential of Egypt and the Arabian Nubian Shield” – a vast geological formation stretching across northeast Africa and the Arabian Peninsula that is believed to host significant untapped mineral resources.