Mining
AzerGold, UAE's IRH to Explore Nakhchivan Critical Minerals
September 16, 2026
3
Min
Azerbaijan's state mining company AzerGold has signed an agreement with Terra Mining, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi's International Resources Holding (IRH), to jointly evaluate and explore the mineral potential of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, Trend reported on 15 September. The document was signed on 14 September in the presence of President Ilham Aliyev and UAE National Security Advisor Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, alongside a package of other Azerbaijan-UAE agreements.
What the deal covers
The agreement, signed by AzerGold chairman Zakir Ibrahimov and IRH chief executive Ali Rashed AlRashdi, initially covers joint geological exploration aimed at identifying strategically important and large-scale critical mineral prospects in Nakhchivan. Work is staged: a review of existing geological data, exploration using modern methods, and identification of prospective areas and targets. If early results are positive, detailed exploration follows, after which the parties would consider joint mining.
No budget, exploration area, target minerals or timeline were disclosed. IRH operates in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, and the stated logic is to pair its technical and investment capacity with AzerGold's local experience.
Why Nakhchivan, why now
Nakhchivan is geologically distinct from mainland Azerbaijan and historically under-explored. Soviet-era work identified salt and molybdenum deposits, but little modern exploration has been done in the exclave, partly because of its isolation from the rest of the country. That isolation is now the subject of a major infrastructure push, with a railway through Nakhchivan being rebuilt and Türkiye building the Kars-Dilucu line to its border, which changes the economics of moving ore or concentrate out.
The UAE angle is equally deliberate. IRH is part of the Abu Dhabi conglomerate IHC and has been building a minerals portfolio across emerging markets; the Nakhchivan deal was signed in the same visit that produced Masdar's new solar and storage agreements and XRG's completed purchase of a stake in the Southern Gas Corridor. Abu Dhabi is positioning itself across Azerbaijan's energy, power and minerals sectors at once.
Where it fits in Azerbaijan's mining push
Baku has spent the past year pushing gold and copper development up the agenda, as CBJ reported in September, and the government treats mining as a non-oil growth sector rather than a sideline. AzerGold, established to consolidate state precious- and non-ferrous-metal assets, has increasingly sought foreign partners for exploration risk it does not want to carry alone. A critical-minerals framing, the agreement's own language, also aligns the project with Western and Gulf supply-chain programmes that fund exploration for copper, molybdenum and battery metals.
Caveats
This is an exploration agreement, not a mine. The industry's rule of thumb is that only a small fraction of exploration targets become deposits and a smaller fraction still become producing operations, typically a decade or more after the first survey. Nakhchivan's terrain is mountainous, water is scarce and any mine would need power and transport infrastructure that does not yet exist. The agreement is a sensible first step by two parties with money and patience; investors should not price in ore until a resource estimate is published.
