Iran and the Zinc Treasure

Sometimes people do not know things about their own country that the rest of the world is counting on. This article is about one of them: a metal we touch every day without seeing it, and a deposit in the Yazd desert that on its own holds about as much zinc as a mining nation's entire reserves. We are not writing this for empty pride, but to show exactly where the gap between "having" and "building" lies, and who can jump it.

01. What zinc is and why the world wants it

Zinc is the fourth most-used metal in the world after iron, aluminium and copper, a market of roughly $40 billion a year. Most of it goes into galvanising: the thin coating that stops steel from rusting. Every bridge, power pylon, car body, guardrail and pipe that lasts for decades usually carries a layer of zinc. Then come brass and alloys, die-cast parts, zinc oxide in rubber, ceramics, pharmaceuticals and sunscreen, fertilisers and dietary supplements.

Several developments have turned zinc from an ordinary metal into a strategic one:

• Critical mineral lists: the US Geological Survey added zinc to the official US critical minerals list in 2022. The United States imports about 77% of its refined zinc.
• Batteries and storage: zinc batteries are thermally stable, need no fire suppression and are more economical for storage durations beyond eight hours. The International Zinc Association projects zinc use in batteries to rise from about 600 tonnes in 2020 to about 77,000 tonnes by 2030. Eos Energy in the US is doubling its zinc-battery capacity to 8 GWh.
• Health and food: the UN calls zinc a "life-saving commodity"; deficiency costs an estimated 200,000 children's lives a year. Calcareous soils, which make up much of Iran's farmland, are typically poor in available zinc, and data cited by Iran's Vice-Presidency for Science puts zinc deficiency at about 40% of Iranians.

02. What Iran has

Iranian and French researchers writing in Geoscience Frontiers (2018) count more than 350 lead-zinc deposits and occurrences in Iran, concentrated in the Malayer-Esfahan and Yazd-Anarak belts, both part of the great Tethyan metallogenic belt. Two of them are world-scale:

• Angouran, Zanjan: mined for decades, with parts of its ore grading up to 40% zinc, a grade rarely seen anywhere. S&P Global puts its mining capacity at about one million tonnes of ore a year. It made Zanjan Iran's zinc-smelting hub.
• Mehdiabad, Yazd: according to Ore Geology Reviews (2019), about 394 million tonnes of ore averaging 4.2% zinc, 1.6% lead and 36 g/t silver, plus more than 40 million tonnes of barite. The authors call it a world-class deposit and the largest sediment-hosted Zn-Pb deposit in Iran, formed on a shallow sea floor in the Early Cretaceous, roughly 120 million years ago.

One comparison shows the scale: the zinc contained in Mehdiabad's ore is estimated at about 16.5 million tonnes. The USGS's 2026 figures put Peru's entire zinc reserves at about 18 million tonnes, India's at 10 million and Mexico's at 14 million. One deposit, the size of a mining country's reserves.

03. What is being built right now

Mehdiabad has been known since the 1990s but lay dormant for years without capital or technology; the USGS describes the project as "under development since the 1990s but repeatedly delayed". What has changed:

• 2017 IMIDRO signs a roughly $1 billion contract with a six-company consortium led by Iran's Mobin Mining; a 25-year operating term
• 2023 Phase 1 of the processing plant, about $300 million of investment, reaches its final stages; managers call it the largest lead-zinc processing plant in the Middle East
• 2025 more than 170,000 tonnes of lead-zinc concentrate produced in the first quarter of the Iranian year alone
• February 2026 output of zinc and lead concentrate and barite surges past extraction and sales targets (Trend)

The final target, in three phases, is 800,000 tonnes of zinc concentrate and 80,000 tonnes of lead-silver concentrate a year, from an extractable reserve of about 170 million tonnes: decades of work. The plant's water comes 100 km by pipeline from Yazd's treated municipal wastewater, not from desert aquifers. Iranian engineers found a sustainable answer for a mine in the driest part of the country.

Downstream, Zanjan's dozens of smelters give Iran about 480,000 tonnes a year of zinc ingot capacity, of which only about 220,000 tonnes is actually produced, because feed has been short. Mehdiabad fills exactly that gap. S&P Global names Turkey, Iraq and the UAE as the main markets for Iranian zinc products.

04. The lesson from Korea and India: the value is not in the rock

South Korea has no zinc mines to speak of. Yet Korea Zinc, founded in 1974 and starting with 50,000 tonnes a year in 1978, is today the world's largest zinc smelter: about 650,000 tonnes of zinc and 420,000 tonnes of lead a year, plus 18 other metals and chemicals pulled from the same concentrates, from gold and silver to indium, bismuth, antimony, gallium and germanium. Its engineers say the secret is that they do not treat by-products as waste but recover other materials from them. In December 2025 the company announced a $7.4 billion refinery in Tennessee backed by the US government; its customers include Samsung, Hyundai and Lockheed Martin. A country without mines became a chokepoint in the world's critical-metals supply chain through processing knowledge.

India took another path: state-owned Hindustan Zinc, founded in 1966, built on the Rampura Agucha mine, often called the world's largest zinc mine, and integrated smelters in Rajasthan, and is today the world's second-largest zinc producer, with about 25,000 employees and revenue of roughly $3.6 billion.

Two countries, two paths, one lesson: ore alone is not wealth. Wealth lies in processing, by-product recovery, standards, engineering and the people who know how. All of which can be learned.

05. The value ladder: from rock to product

• Ore and concentrate: mining, crushing, flotation. Money is in volume, mostly for large companies.
• Zinc ingot: smelting and electrolytic refining. This is where Zanjan stands.
• Galvanising, die-casting, alloys: industrial services for steel, cars, appliances and construction, with a large domestic market.
• Zinc oxide and chemicals: rubber, ceramics, paint, pharma, sunscreen, animal feed. Nano and pharmaceutical-grade zinc oxide is a knowledge-based product with global customers.
• Zinc fertilisers and supplements: Iran's calcareous soils are zinc-poor, so a ready domestic market exists. An Iranian knowledge-based company already makes a liposomal zinc supplement, about 200,000 bottles a year.
• Zinc batteries: zinc-ion, zinc-bromine, zinc-air. The world is early on this road and Iran's distance from the leaders is smaller than in lithium.
• Recycling: steelmaking furnace dust is rich in zinc, and Iran is among the world's top ten steel producers: a large "urban mine" still largely untapped.
• By-products: silver, barite (Iran holds the world's largest barite reserves; barite is the main ingredient of oil-drilling mud) and, with the right technology, associated rare metals such as germanium and indium, exactly what Korea does.

06. Ditoman's suggestion to young Iranians

We write this part plainly, because we think it is the most important part of the article. Mehdiabad and Angouran are run by large companies; their job is extraction. But the upper rungs of the ladder, from zinc oxide to batteries to mining software, are where a small team with the right knowledge can enter. Some concrete suggestions:

• Pick one rung and go global on it. You do not need to build the whole chain. One product: pharmaceutical-grade zinc oxide to an international standard, a zinc fertiliser with proven efficacy, a steel-dust recycling process, a zinc battery cell. Something that, if it works in Yazd, will find buyers in India, Turkey and Egypt.
• Start with knowledge that is cheap to acquire and slow to acquire. Metallurgy, chemical and materials engineering, electrochemistry, economic geology, and alongside them data and automation. Korea Zinc wants digital twins and AI in its new plant; these skills can be learned today, from any city.
• Start at your own university. The universities of Zanjan, Yazd, Tehran, Amirkabir and Isfahan have published on these very deposits for years, some in the world's leading journals. Put your thesis on a real problem from this chain, defined with a factory, not only a professor.
• Work to global language and standards from day one. A product with international certification sells in every market; one without sells in one. Technical English, documentation, quality control and patents are part of the product, not an afterthought.
• Look at waste as feedstock. Wherever something is "thrown away" in the zinc industry, there is probably a hidden business. That is precisely the philosophy that made Korea the world's biggest player.
• Do not think about Iran; think from Iran. The reserves are large enough that the target market should never be only domestic. Someone who is twenty today and spends ten years on one rung will, at thirty, be an expert in something the world queues for, because by every forecast zinc will be wanted more in the coming decade, not less.

At Ditoman we do not see investing only as buying an asset. Investing in your own knowledge, in a field where your country has natural reserves and the world has rising demand, may be the surest investment a young Iranian can make.

07. Seeing the obstacles too

This is a story of hope, not denial. The gap between reserves and world markets is filled with real obstacles: access to capital and technology under sanctions, water and energy in arid regions, and competition with producers decades ahead. Iran's share of the global zinc market is still about 1%, while by its own Geological Survey's figures the country holds about 7% of the world's mineral reserves with 1% of its population. That gap can be read two ways: regret, or opportunity. We choose the second, not because it is easy, but because it is the only reading that leads anywhere.

The takeaway: the treasure is here, under the soil of Yazd and Zanjan, in the papers of Iranian researchers, and in a plant in the desert running on a city's recycled water. The art is turning rock into value, and that art can be learned.