Oman’s mining vision of the futureSix decades on, the Sultanate is on a path to diversification to reduce its reliance on hydrocarbons, which have seen fluctuating fortunes in recent decades. Those vagaries are likely to intensify as the global energy transition progresses, but Oman’s effort is not a hurried response to that realisation. The resumption of activity at Lasail, situated in Wilayat of Sohar in the kingdom’s Block 4 mining area, represented a revival of copper mining after a 30-year hiatus. During those years the kingdom’s attention was on domestic smelting from low-grade volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) deposits, and it eventually saw success in copper production by the early 1990s. However, by the mid-1990s, production had largely stalled as low ore grades, high extraction and processing costs, and weak global copper prices became burdensome.