Visiting Simandou: is Guinea's mining mega-project finally ready?

Above cushioned sofas in the waiting room of Guinea's environment ministry, a clock features a face familiar from posters and buildings everywhere in Conakry: Guinea's military ruler-turned-President Mamady Doumbouya. The hands are stuck at a quarter to midnight. But for a nation that has spent three decades caught between promise and paralysis over the world's most coveted source of steel, a long-delayed new dawn may finally be approaching. After its discovery in the late 1990s, Simandou, Guinea's key mining asset, languished in a series of protracted legal and geopolitical sagas.

Rio Tinto, initially granted exploration rights over the entire Simandou range, was abruptly stripped of the northern half in 2008 when a dying President Lansana Conté awarded the asset instead to Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz's BSGR. In March 2025 Steinmetz lost his final appeal in the Swiss courts against his 2021 conviction for bribery over the Simandou contract. In 2023, a five-year prison sentence was reduced to three years with 18 months to be served. He has announced his intention to challenge the ruling at the European Court of Human Rights.

In 2014, after a lengthy inquiry, President Alpha Condé annulled BSGR's rights on grounds of corruption, triggering further years of litigation. BSGR agreed in a 2019 settlement to relinquish its claims on Simandou. Now, after the decades of false starts, Simandou is at last rolling into action. Its timing is politically charged: the project is being switched on just weeks before the 28 December election and is chief among President Doumbouya's first administration deliverables.

Rollercoaster ride

On 11 November the first clumps of iron ore travelled from the remote Guinée Forestière region near the southeastern borders with Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire on a newly constructed 600 km railway to the Atlantic port of Morébaya, near the capital, Conakry.

On cue from French signalling equipment, US‑made locomotives haul Chinese-built wagons in this carefully balanced multinational project. One by one, the blue wagons rotate 180 degrees, spilling dark-brown loads onto a conveyer belt, which then rises on a shiny red and blue rollercoaster-like structure, before dropping the ore onto waiting barges bound for steel mills in China.

What is unfolding here is more than a mining project. It is an engineering feat of improbable scale, born from determined geopolitical manoeuvring by the world's 35th-poorest nation. Guinea is testing whether a small country can convert its resources into something more enduring than transitory royalty cheques.

An aerial view of the SimFer mining complex in the Simandou mountain range. (Photo by PATRICK MEINHARDT / AFP) Flight into the unknow

For iron ore, once loaded, the journey from pit to port along the new heavy-haul railway takes around 18 hours. By air, the journey is 90 minutes. Below, slate‑grey rivers snake through dense forest, punctuated by shacks and muddy paths puddled from the May-to-October rainy season.

At Simandou, terracotta roads carved into hillsides are lined with yellow earth‑moving trucks; colossal cuttings traverse mountains resembling a giant's staircase. "Two years ago, this was all jungle," says an engineer with Rio SimFer - operator of the southern half of Simandou - as he sweeps a fluorescent‑yellow uniformed arm in a wide circle. The team lowered an entire section of the mountain here by more than 90 metres to create a stable platform for mining. "We cut a track up there and kept pushing until the slope finally let us through."

Some of the world's largest mining trucks, capable of carrying 220‑tonne loads, arrive as disassembled giants and are rebuilt on site. Bridges along the national highway had to be reinforced simply to bear their weight. "You can't imagine," reflects the engineer, "how much of Guinea we had to rebuild before we even touched the ore".

Sidiki Koné, a 60-year-old geologist from Kouroussa, a few hundred kilometres north, was part of the exploration team that bored the first deep holes here. "We went more than 185 metres and it was still iron‑rich," he says. "We sent the samples to London and people were shocked at the quality." Even at 600 metres, the drills were still cutting through iron ore, he recalls.

Once mined and crushed, the ore travels from the mountains of Simandou down a 2.4‑kilometre conveyor to a stockyard and onto the newly built railway. At full capacity, Simandou's integrated rail system is designed to run around 40 trains per day, each roughly a kilometre long. The 100 or so wagons carry as much as 8,000 tonnes of ore per trip to Morébaya. The port - an area of mangroves and marsh just three years ago - houses four giant ship-loaders.

A mining reset

If the engineering feat is immense, the politics behind it are even more intricate: rival foreign interests, shifting military regimes, contested mineral rights and years of brinkmanship repeatedly threatened to sink Simandou.

After successive coups, fraught transitions and repeatedly halted negotiations, Colonel Mamady Doumbouya - seizing power in 2021 - installed a technocratic cabinet. He appointed Bouna Sylla - long regarded within Guinea's mining administration as a steady, technical hand rather than a political actor - as minister of mines. Sylla's appointment signalled the regime's intent to reset relations with the mining majors and salvage Simandou.

"We reached a point where the project could have failed," Sylla says in an interview at his office in Conakry. It took months of tense and sometimes all‑night negotiations, with partners "hesitating" and "pushing their own direction," before Guinea imposed what he calls "a line everyone had to follow".

That "line" - the 2022 Co‑Development Agreement, known informally as Guinea Expectations - forced all partners to pool rail and port infrastructure rather than carve up the country with competing private lines.

Back to China

"Without that pressure from government, we wouldn't be here," says Chris Aitchison, managing director of Rio SimFer. "Guinea was very clear: if you want to mine Simandou, you participate in the shared system."

The compromise created today's unlikely tapestry of global players - each one dependent on the other - from the German-made iron ore crushers to the locomotives from Wabtec in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. A batch of Chinese-made locomotives were quietly sent back earlier this year to honour the multiparty commitment. The international arrangement is central to avoiding a Chinese monopoly - not only over the mining and infrastructure but, perhaps more importantly, the destination and pricing.

The need to feed its steel mills motivates China to use Simandou's considerable output - equivalent to roughly 5% of current global iron ore production at full planned capacity of 120m metric tonnes per annum - not only to maintain supply but to keep prices down. Guinea, on the other hand, intends to wield its influence to prevent a market glut and defend value by, for example, diversifying distribution beyond China to Europe and the Middle East.

"Our main interest is to keep prices high," says minister Sylla, without elaborating on tactics. Sharing infrastructure has the added benefit of making the project more sustainable - both financially through pooling the cost, and environmentally, by having only one railway cutting through the forests.

Yet, despite the significant achievement of global cooperation at Simandou, no one is under any illusion that China is anything less than the dominant player here. The northern half of Simandou - blocks 1 and 2 - is run by the Singapore-Chinese consortium Winning Consortium Simandou (WCS). Anglo-Australian group Rio Tinto holds 53% of the southern blocks 3 and 4, working with a coalition led by Chinese state‑backed Chinalco and Baowu.

For Guinea's part, the state owns 15% of all blocks, as well as the same stake in the railway and port, with veto rights over strategic decisions. These holdings sit within a 35‑year concession for the integrated mine-rail-port system.

The state holding company representing Guinea's interests is Compagnie du TransGuinéen (CTG). It is present wherever key decisions on the mine, rail or port are taken, says its chairman Mamadou Nagnalen Barry. This structure gives Guinea "real influence, not a ceremonial share," he says.

A China Railway 18th Bureau Group employee watches as a train transports rocks at the SimFer mining complex in the Simandou mountain range. (Photo by PATRICK MEINHARDT / AFP) Local workers assume roles

Back at the mine, even the transportation of workers reflects the multinational makeup. Scattered around Simandou are yellow school buses incongruously labelled "North Carolina", repurposed from across the Atlantic to ferry labourers between the camps, cranes and crushers.

Among more than 25,000 workers stationed across the mine, railway and port, 82% are Guinean. With low literacy levels, training modules are adapted to rely on visual tools and oral instruction.

At a training centre, 69 yellow hard-hatted apprentices - 16 of them women - learn welding, carpentry, electrics and heavy‑equipment operations. A "Simandou Academy" is being launched to build long‑term industrial skills.

This training is part of the effort to address what Chris Aitchison at Rio SimFer describes as the biggest risk for Simandou: demobilisation. Employment is expected to more than halve to around 10,000 long‑term roles. "If people feel abandoned, they will disrupt the mine," he warns.

Ministers prefer to use the term "remobilisation". Simandou must create opportunities far beyond the mine itself, says minister of planning Ismaël Nabé.

Workers will be redirected to new agro‑processing, energy and logistics projects springing up along the rail corridor, Nabé projects.

A China Railway 18th Bureau Group employee stands at the back of a train transporting rocks at the SimFer mining complex in the Simandou mountain range. (Photo by PATRICK MEINHARDT / AFP) Make way for chimps

Simandou is the critical habitat for a multitude of endangered wildlife. At one key mining ridge, a tunnel burrows 900 metres underground, not for drilling but to allow safe passage for the region's western chimpanzees. Elsewhere, high-voltage pylons are built dozens of metres higher than usual to allow elephants to roam.

Visible for miles, a dense green lung breaks up the brown scraped hillsides. This is the sacred Boyboyba forest - home to a unique plant species discovered by local botanist Denise Molmou.

The entire area is excluded from mining. Nearby seed banks hold more than 3.8m specimens from 42 vulnerable plants to be reintroduced or relocated as mining expands.

In all, the natural corridors and protected sites have cost the miners hundreds of millions of dollars and countless delays.

Everyone has had to learn patience here. Guinea must strike a balance between economic development and environmental and social protections, says environment minister Djami Diallo in her office besides the waiting room with the frozen clock.

"We will develop Simandou, but we will not develop it at any cost."