Saudi Arabia Has a New Gold Mine Coming by 2028 — and Hard-Rock Conveying Is Where New Mines Lose TimeSaudi Arabia Has a New Gold Mine Coming by 2028 — and Hard-Rock Conveying Is Where New Mines Lose Time

Ma'aden expects first gold at Ar Rjum, its newest gold mine, by the end of 2028, and its chief executive described a very strong performance from the gold business in the second quarter of 2026, a quarter in which group revenue reached USD 2.9 billion. Behind that single mine sits a much larger pipeline: mineral exploration spending in the Kingdom rose to an estimated USD 346 million in 2025 from about USD 50 million in 2020, more than 226 exploration and mining companies are now active, and Round 11 of licensing includes three gold targets. Every one of those projects will be judged on throughput, and in a hard-rock gold plant throughput begins at the crusher feed — which means it begins with a conveyor belt.

The technical problem is also different from the materials most Saudi industrial suppliers know. Phosphate is abrasive and hygroscopic. Cement clinker is hot. Bauxite is wet and cohesive. Gold ore is none of those things in the dominant sense. It is hard, siliceous and low-grade, and it is the hardness that destroys equipment and the low grade that makes every lost tonne expensive.

What Actually Changed in 2026

Two data points from Ma'aden's own reporting frame the opportunity, and they are worth separating because they carry different implications.

The first is a project date. In its second-quarter 2026 results, released on 9 August 2026, Ma'aden stated that first gold at Ar Rjum, described as the company's newest gold mine, is expected by the end of 2028. That is a specific, dated commitment from the operator, and it defines a procurement window: a mine targeting first gold in late 2028 will be specifying and ordering its conveyor belt and bulk material handling equipment well before then.

The second is a performance statement. Group revenue for the quarter was USD 2.9 billion, up 16 percent year on year, with EBITDA of USD 1.0 billion and net profit attributable to shareholders of USD 0.6 billion. The chief executive, Bob Wilt, attributed the aluminium result to a best-ever financial performance and added that the gold business also performed very strongly, while noting challenges in sulfur supply and logistics on the phosphate side.

First gold at Ar Rjum by end-2028

The significance of a first-gold date is not the date itself. It is what a first-gold date implies about everything upstream of the gold room: the crushing circuit must be commissioned, the coarse ore stockpile must be live, the conveyor system must run at design rate for a sustained period, and the splice quality must hold under continuous load. Mines do not miss first-gold dates because the leach tanks were late. They miss them because the front end of the plant could not deliver steady feed.

Mansourah Massarah as the benchmark

The second reference point is scale. A Saudi Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources official, speaking in 2026, described the expanding Mansourah Massarah mine as a 10 million-ounce gold asset and cited it as proof that the Kingdom hosts tier-one mining assets.

That matters for suppliers because it establishes a reference case. A 10 million-ounce resource is not a small operation, and the handling equipment serving it has to survive the same duty cycle for years. When a new project like Ar Rjum is specified, the realistic comparison set is not a quarry that runs one shift; it is an operation that runs continuously and measures downtime in lost ounces.

The Exploration Pipeline Is Bigger Than the Mine

The mine is the visible part. The pipeline behind it is what makes this a durable topic rather than a single announcement.

According to Ahmed Alaqeel, exploration development general manager at the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources, mineral exploration spending in Saudi Arabia rose to an estimated USD 346 million in 2025, from roughly USD 50 million in 2020. Over the same period the number of active exploration and mining companies rose from six to more than 226, and the land under active exploration roughly doubled from about 35,000 square kilometres to more than 85,000.

Those are not marginal changes. A thirty-fold increase in exploration spending and a nearly forty-fold increase in the number of operating companies, within five years, describes an industry being built rather than expanded.

Three gold targets in Round 11

The licensing rounds make the pipeline concrete. Round 11, being executed in 2026, covers eight sites across approximately 1,800 square kilometres, including four premium copper targets, three gold targets and one iron oxide copper-gold deposit.

Three gold targets in a single round is a meaningful signal for equipment suppliers, because a gold target that reaches feasibility becomes a plant. And a plant needs a crushing circuit, a stockpile, a mill feed conveyor belt and a tailings handling system, none of which can be improvised late in a construction schedule.

The Arabian Shield as the constraint

The geological setting matters too. The Arabian Shield, described by the ministry as one of the largest and most underexplored geological structures globally, spans more than 600,000 square kilometres. New mineralised signatures identified there include large porphyry copper systems and sedimentary exhalative mineralisation.

For conveying, the Shield's relevance is topographic and climatic rather than geological. Hard-rock deposits in shield terrain tend to sit in broken, elevated ground, which pushes plants toward steep inclines, long transfer distances and remote sites with limited maintenance access. Those are conveying problems before they are mining problems.

Why Gold Ore Is a Different Conveying Duty

Most Saudi bulk handling experience sits in limestone, clinker, gypsum, bauxite, phosphate and aggregates. Gold ore differs in three specific ways, and each one changes a specification decision.

It is harder. Gold-hosted ore is typically siliceous, and silica is one of the most abrasive minerals a belt will ever carry. The relevant measure is not the cover's abrasion rating in isolation but the combination of cover hardness, cut-and-gouge resistance and the impact energy at the loading point, where run-of-mine lump arrives from the primary crusher.

It is lower grade. Gold grades in commercial operations are measured in grams per tonne, which means the ratio of waste moved to metal recovered is enormous. That makes every tonne of ore handled expensive relative to the value it carries, and it makes unplanned stoppages disproportionately costly: a plant that stops is not pausing production of a cheap commodity.

It is often conveyed a long way. Hard-rock mines frequently separate the pit from the plant by distance, whether because of topography, buffer requirements or the geometry of the orebody. Long single-flight conveyors concentrate risk: one splice failure stops the entire flight, and there is no parallel path.

Hardness, not moisture, is the dominant mechanism

This is where suppliers with cement or bauxite experience make their first mistake. In clinker duty, the enemy is temperature. In bauxite duty, the enemy is moisture and cohesion. In gold ore duty, the enemy is abrasion plus impact, and the failure mode is gradual rather than dramatic: cover wear accelerates, the belt's cut edges fray, and the carcass begins to be exposed at exactly the points where the material lands.

The practical consequence is that a conveyor belt specification written for limestone will underperform on gold ore even when the tonnage and belt width look adequate, because the wear rate per tonne is higher and the inspection interval that worked at a quarry will not hold.

Value per tonne changes the economics of spillage

Consider the arithmetic, with assumptions stated plainly. At a grade of two grams per tonne and a gold price of USD 4,500 an ounce, a tonne of ore contains roughly USD 290 of contained gold — before recovery losses. At five grams per tonne the figure is above USD 700.

The point is not that the belt carries that value in a form that can be recovered from spillage. It cannot. The point is that at those values, the cost of a stopped plant dwarfs the cost of the belt, and the cost of a poorly specified transfer point is measured in availability rather than in housekeeping hours. A specification conversation that begins with belt price per metre is starting in the wrong place.

The Four Conveying Duties in a Gold Flowsheet

A conventional hard-rock gold plant has four distinct conveying duties, and they are usually specified by different people at different times, which is why inconsistencies appear.

Reading down the table, the specification priorities barely overlap. The first duty is about surviving impact. The second is about surviving abrasion. The third is about surviving cycles. The fourth is about surviving chemistry. A single plant-wide belt standard will be wrong for at least two of them.

Mine-to-Mill Distance: The Problem Saudi Terrain Creates

In flat, open terrain, a mine can put the plant next to the pit and use haul trucks for a short distance. In shield terrain, that option often disappears.

Long single-flight conveying introduces a set of problems that short conveyors do not have. Thermal expansion over hundreds of metres of steel structure changes take-up requirements. Belt stretch accumulates, and a splice that was correctly tensioned at commissioning drifts out of specification as the belt creeps. Access for maintenance becomes a logistics exercise, so inspections get deferred, and deferred inspections are how a worn cover becomes an exposed carcass.

There is also a Saudi-specific factor: dust. Fine silica dust in a dry, hot environment is abrasive in suspension, and it migrates into every enclosure. Belt cleaners that work in a wet temperate climate can wear faster in a dry abrasive one, and the wear is invisible until cleaning performance drops and carryback begins.

Why the splice is the single point of failure

A conveyor belt is a system, but it fails at one place more often than any other: the joint. On a short conveyor, a splice failure is an inconvenience. On a long flight feeding a mill, it is a plant stoppage measured in days, because a replacement splice requires trained technicians, the right equipment, and time.

This is the argument for mechanical fastening versus vulcanized splicing, and in hard-rock duty the argument usually resolves in one direction. Mechanical fasteners are faster to install and easier to replace in the field, and they are appropriate on low-tension, short, secondary duties. On a high-tension main line carrying abrasive ore, fastener holes create stress concentrations and leak points, and the joint becomes the wear point.

Hot vulcanized splicing, done to a defined procedure with controlled temperature, pressure and time, produces a joint whose tensile strength approaches that of the belt itself. The practical target is splice efficiency above 90 percent of belt strength, and achieving it consistently depends as much on site conditions and technician competence as on the splice material.

What New Mines Get Wrong in the Specification

Five recurring errors, drawn from how hard-rock projects are actually specified.

Specifying by analogy to a quarry. The tonnage and the belt width may match, but the wear rate per tonne does not. Hard siliceous ore consumes cover thickness faster, and cover thickness is the variable that determines service life.

Treating the stockpile as civil works. The coarse ore stockpile is a live handling system with reclaim, not a static pile. Reclaim duty — variable moisture, surge, frequent starts — is often the most punishing duty on the site, and it is frequently the last to be specified.

Deferring splice planning to commissioning. Splice quality determines availability from day one. A project that selects the belt in procurement and thinks about splicing during installation has already lost the ability to specify splice efficiency as a contractual requirement.

Ignoring the dust environment. Cover compound and cleaner selection should account for dry abrasive dust, not a generic temperate-climate duty profile.

Buying on price per metre. On a low-tonnage, short-life duty, this is rational. On a main line feeding a mill, the correct comparison is cost per tonne conveyed over the service life, which is a different number and usually a different supplier.

How BEDROCK Fits a Hard-Rock Project

BEDROCK is a conveyor system solutions provider based in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, backed by a 16-year engineering and manufacturing base in Ningbo operating as KILOMEGA. Our core customers are quarry, crusher, cement, concrete batching, building-material, chemical, steel and bulk material handling operations across the Kingdom.

We state that plainly because it defines where we are strongest. A gold plant's front end — primary crushing, coarse ore stockpile, reclaim and mill feed — is physically a hard-rock crushing and conveying circuit, and that is precisely the duty our quarry and crusher customers run every day. The difference between a limestone quarry and a gold mine's crushing circuit is the ore's hardness and the cost of downtime, not the mechanical arrangement.

Abrasion-first specification. Cover compound and thickness are selected against the ore's abrasiveness and the impact energy at the loading point, rather than against a generic heavy-duty label. Our application experience is concentrated in exactly this kind of abrasive, high-impact duty.

Splicing as an engineered scope. Our engineers carry out hot vulcanized jointing on site with a target splice efficiency above 90 percent, and we treat the joint as a specified deliverable rather than an installation detail.

Long-flight and incline competence. Conveying on steep inclines and long single flights is routine in Saudi quarry and cement operations, where topography forces the same design decisions a shield-terrain mine faces.

Local stock and defined response. Local spare-parts stock in Saudi Arabia for critical components, remote technical support within 24 hours, and a defined on-site response path for downtime — relevant for a remote site where a stock-out is measured in days.

Specification review at the design stage. Belt survey and duty review before capital commitment, so that the four duties in a flowsheet are specified separately rather than under one standard.

Our range covers industrial conveyor belts for abrasive, hot, wet and high-impact duty, supported by technical services from selection through installation and performance tracking.

Planning a hard-rock crushing and conveying circuit? Send us the ore's abrasiveness, top size, bulk density, moisture and peak tonnage per hour for each duty point — and our engineers will return a belt, splice and cleaning specification per stream.

Contact BEDROCK WhatsApp: +966 56 171 7029 · Email: [email protected] · Website: www.bedrockco.sa · Salman Farisi St., Khalidiyah Al-Janubiyah, Dammam, Saudi Arabia

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