In the last five years, the President Luis Abinader has turned the mining and the exploration of strategic resources in a Nation project. A kind of “Gold Rush” or fever for underground wealth that, if achieved, would put the country on the world geostrategic map.
But we are not talking about gold of a lifetime, it is about oiltheir Derivativesand the Rare earth.
Abinader has not hidden its oil ambition. In 2025 it promoted a New law that opens the country to the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas with rules made to attract international investors.
Foreign companies will be able to enter whenever at least one 15 % of the capital Be Dominican.
The road map includes a Petroleum Round in 2026where exploration blocks will be auctioned in different areas.
Since 2021, teams from the Dominican oil refinery They have been studying the basins of Azua, Enriquillo, San Juan and El Cibao. Preliminary estimates speak of about 500 million barrels of oil in the subsoil, with around 80 million potentially recoverable.
The government has even sought International alliances unusual. There are agreements with Argentina to exchange knowledge about exploitation of hydrocarbons and evaluations so that RD invests in Gas projects abroad. Doors have also been played in Guyana, the neighboring country that went from being an unknown on the energy map to one of the new rich of the oil.
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In parallel, the government has launched to search Rare earth In Pedernales, specifically in the Bahoruco Sierraabout old bauxite mines. These minerals They are essential to manufacture from wind turbines to cell phones and missiles. The global interest is so great that the United States and China have been in a silent war for their control for years.
The project started with the University of Barcelona and now it has the technical support of the US Army Engineers. UU. The preliminary results of the government talk about up to 100 million tons of reservations.
To handle it, Abinader created a state company, Emidomwhich will be in charge of negotiating alliances and supervising exploitation. The official discourse It is that the exploitation will be “sustainable” and that the benefit will remain “for the Dominican people.”
While the government insists on the search for oil and rare earths, there are projects for the exploitation of gold that have been waiting for years. The most popular case is the Romero project, in San Juan de la Maguana. Identified by a Canadian company, it has been ready to start environmental impact studies almost a decade.
The company promises jobs, taxes and technology without cyanide, but faces a local rejection wall. Community leaders, farmers and priests fear that mining will end the water in the region.
In Dajabón, another gold project is paralyzed. The Canadian Minera Unigold identified important deposits.
Even Barrick, the largest mining company, had to wait and negotiate hard to expand the useful life of the Pueblo Viejo mine. The expansion required a new queue dam that meant to evict hundreds of families. After years of protests and negotiations, the permit arrived with strict conditions.
