Mauritania’s mining sector is being reshaped by two simultaneous movements. The first is structural: SNIM, the state-owned iron ore company, is executing its most ambitious expansion in decades, backed by $275 million in loans from the European Investment Bank and the African Development Bank, with a production target of 15.5 million tonnes in 2026 and 45 million tonnes by 2031. The second is technological: satellite-based mineral detection, powered by hyperspectral imaging and deep learning, is compressing gold exploration timelines from years to weeks and revealing ore convergence zones where iron and gold signatures overlap. Taken together, these two dynamics are redrawing Mauritania’s mining map.
The iron trajectory is the more established of the two. SNIM produced a record 14.7 million tonnes of iron ore in 2025, surpassing its previous record of 14.3 million tonnes set in 2024. The company operates three mines at Zouerate in the north, connected to the port of Nouadhibou by a 700-kilometre railway that is now being modernized as part of a $467 million logistics expansion programme. The port itself was upgraded in late 2022 to accommodate vessels of up to 230,000 tonnes, from a previous 150,000-tonne limit. SNIM’s three-phase plan envisions 24 million tonnes from its own operations by 2031, supplemented by 21 million tonnes from the Elowja and Atoumai projects developed in partnership with Eclencor and Hadid Saudi Arabia. The long-term horizon is 80 million tonnes by 2045. Beyond volume, the strategic orientation is shifting toward higher-grade ore, iron pellet production and, eventually, green steel, in line with the direction taken by global steelmakers.
On the gold side, the picture is more fragmented but increasingly active. Tasiast, operated by Kinross Gold, remains by far the dominant asset. The mine produced 622,394 ounces in 2024 but saw output fall by 23% in 2025 as operations moved into lower-grade ore zones. Kinross expects stabilization around 500,000 ounces in 2026, with no return above 600,000 ounces before 2028. Tasiast accounted for 77% of Mauritania’s gold production in 2023 and is the country’s second-largest fiscal contributor to the extractive sector after SNIM. The transition to lower grades is not a surprise. It was planned. But it creates a timing gap in which Mauritania needs new gold sources to maintain revenue from the metal.
This is where exploration is accelerating. In April 2026, Montage Gold secured five greenfield exploration permits covering approximately 2,103 square kilometres in northern Mauritania, following a competitive tender. Four are in the Sfariat block, one in the Zednes block. The geological setting is the boundary between Paleoproterozoic Birimian domains and Archean supracrustal rocks, a known target environment for orogenic gold deposits. Montage has allocated up to $2 million for 2026 exploration, with approximately 15,000 metres of drilling planned from Q4 2026. More than 12 gold prospects are now under active exploration across the country, with new licences issued between 2023 and 2025 to a mix of junior and mid-tier international operators.
At Guelb Moghrein, near Akjoujt, First Quantum Minerals continues to operate a copper-gold mine that is entering its late-life phase. In Q1 2026, the site produced approximately 2,910 tonnes of copper and 7,722 ounces of gold, with full-year projections of around 7,000 tonnes of copper and 30,000 to 40,000 ounces of gold. Gold is progressively becoming the dominant economic driver as copper grades decline, and the operation is shifting toward tailings reprocessing and recovery optimization. Guelb Moghrein accounted for only 3.4% of Mauritania’s gold output in 2023. But the deposit itself, a copper-gold-cobalt-iron oxide system, is precisely the type of multi-metal geology that satellite detection is designed to identify at scale.
The technological layer is where the two metal stories converge. Platforms such as XRTech Group’s Khaza’in system use hyperspectral satellite data, combined with convolutional neural networks, to identify spectral signatures of clay minerals, iron oxides and alteration zones that serve as pathfinders for gold. In the Tasiast region, within the Reguibat Shield, this approach mapped 10 priority gold zones, with the top target receiving a calculated gold probability of 21.69%. The method works because iron and gold, while geologically distinct in many settings, share pathfinder minerals in hydrothermal systems. Sericite, kaolinite and hematite are detectable from orbit. The practical consequence is that iron-rich zones previously mapped only for their bulk commodity potential are now being re-examined for gold co-occurrence.
This does not mean Mauritania is sitting on a continent-scale iron-gold convergence deposit. It means the exploration logic is changing. Satellite detection allows operators to screen thousands of square kilometres in days rather than months, at a fraction of the cost of ground-based campaigns. In a country with over 900 identified mineral occurrences, 20 billion tonnes of estimated iron ore reserves, and a gold potential estimated by the government at more than 25 million ounces, the bottleneck has never been geology. It has been the cost and speed of identifying which zones merit further investment.
The structural context matters. SNIM’s modernization programme is rebuilding the logistics spine of the north. The railway upgrade, the port expansion, the 12 MWp solar plant at Zouerate, these investments serve iron ore, but they also lower the infrastructure threshold for any other mining development in the corridor. A gold operation in the Reguibat Shield benefits from the same rail and power infrastructure being built for iron. This is not deliberate dual-use planning. But it is a de facto convergence of utility.
For the Mauritanian state, the strategic question is diversification sequencing. Iron remains the fiscal anchor: SNIM accounted for 9% of GDP, 14% of public revenue and 37% of export value in 2023. Gold is the growth margin, but its contribution remains heavily concentrated in a single asset now entering a lower-grade phase. The emerging exploration pipeline is promising but early-stage. Between Tasiast’s declining output curve, Guelb Moghrein’s late-life economics and the greenfield permits just being awarded, there is a gap of several years before new gold production could come online at scale.
The question that satellite detection helps reframe is not whether gold exists in Mauritania’s iron-rich geology. It does. The question is whether the exploration tools now available can compress the timeline between discovery and development enough to fill the revenue gap before it widens. The technology is advancing faster than the permitting and financing cycles that govern mine construction. That mismatch, between the speed of detection and the pace of extraction, is where the real tension in Mauritania’s dual metal story sits.