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Operations & Projects

Our portfolio of tier-one assets provides exposure to copper, platinum group, zinc and other metals essential for the world’s transition to clean energy and a low-carbon economy. Our stakeholders benefit from long-life projects with low-costs, low-capital intensity and leading ESG programs.

Kazakhstan

Chu-Sarysu Copper Basin

Ownership: 20%
Pallas Resources

Ivanhoe Mines has formed an exploration Joint Venture with UK-based private company Pallas Resources, to explore the Chu-Sarysu Copper Basin in Kazakhstan. The joint venture covers a highly prospective licence package of up to 16,000 km2, building on decades of detailed geological data to unlock new mineral opportunities in this vast Central Asian landscape. The Chu-Sarysu is the world’s third-largest sediment-hosted copper basin, after the Central African Copperbelt and European Kupferschiefer, hosting 27 million tonnes of known copper. The basin is host to the world-class Dzhezkazgan deposit, which has been continuously mined for over a century.

As announced on February 12, 2025, Ivanhoe has committed to fund $18.7 million in exploration activities over an initial two-year period, with earn-in rights to further increase its ownership up to 80% over time.

Exploration activities began during the first quarter of 2025, including the hiring of an exploration team as well as tendering and awarding an airborne geophysics contract.

Fieldwork on the Merke licence has identified copper mineralization outcropping on surface, with an approximately 20-metre thick zone. Reconnaissance work by Pallas and Ivanhoe Mines has identified visible copper mineralization at surface, in the form of malachite, azurite and chalcocite on the Merke licence. The licence is located in the south of the Chu-Sarysu Basin, and includes a 36-kilometre-long, historically-identified stratigraphic trend, with multiple samples returning between 1.0% and 5.0% copper.

The approximately 15,000-metre drill campaign, planned for 2025 has commenced in the western section of the joint venture’s licence package on the Glubokoe licence several hundred kilometers to the north of the Merke licence. Drilling has started within 10 months of forming the joint venture with Pallas Resources.

The first drill hole is testing potential extensions of mineralization first noted in a Soviet-era stratigraphic hole drilled in the 1980s, which intersected three separate copper-bearing intervals over 26 metres.

The initial drill holes in the 2025 campaign are expected to be between 800 and 1,000 metres deep, and will assist with calibrating the results with historic and newly acquired geophysical datasets. This in turn will inform the stratigraphic and facies models, as well as help identify drill targets for the remainder of the current approximately 15,000-metre program.

Read the September 4, 2025 news release to learn more.