The firm behind the advice

Halberg advises the owners of mineral ground in Pakistan on the decisions that determine whether it makes money. How the deposit should be worked, what specification the output has to hold, and which market will pay for it. We also supply the cutting and drilling equipment that does the work.

The firm was built inside these operations rather than alongside them. We have worked granite and marble in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, chromite in Balochistan and a copper project in North Waziristan. We have placed Pakistani iron ore, chromite, quartz, bauxite and white marble with buyers across Europe, China, the Middle East and Africa, and we bring South African and Indonesian thermal coal into the Pakistani cement sector.

Most advice on a deposit comes from one point on the chain. The geologist does not price the cargo, and the trader has never stood on the bench. We have held the position at both ends and been paid, or left unpaid, on the result. That is the standard every judgement on this site is drawn from.

A deposit rarely underperforms for geological reasons. It underperforms because the extraction method was wrong for the rock, because grade was never controlled to a written specification, or because the material was sold into a market that was never going to pay for it.

We have sat on both sides of that problem, as the operation selling the material and as the trader placing it. That is the vantage point our advice is written from. It is also why we will tell an owner when the honest answer is that the ground does not justify the investment.