Porgera Gold Mine: Owners, Output, Reserves and Impacts

Porgera is a large gold mine in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and it is back in production after more than three years on care and maintenance. Since the restart it is owned 51% by PNG stakeholders and 49% by Barrick Niugini Limited, a 50/50 venture of Barrick and Zijin Mining; Barrick’s own share is 24.5% (Barrick Annual Report, 2025). The mine produced 376,000 ounces of gold on a 100% basis in 2025 and 172,000 ounces in the first half of 2026 (Barrick Q2 2026 mine statistics).

This page gives the ownership split, the output and cost numbers, reserves, the timeline from 1990, how the ore is processed and what is documented about its effects on rivers and communities. Where a figure is Barrick’s share only, we say so. Where a figure is a company forecast, we say that too.

Porgera at a glance

Who owns the Porgera gold mine?

Ownership changed in December 2023. After the mine’s lease was not renewed in 2020, the PNG government and the previous operator agreed a new structure. The mine is now held through a joint venture owned 51% by PNG stakeholders (the national government’s Kumul Minerals, the Enga provincial government and local landowners) and 49% by Barrick Niugini Limited (BNL), a joint venture of Barrick and Zijin Mining Group, so each holds 24.5% of the mine. BNL operates it (Barrick, 10 December 2023; the annual report names the 49% holder as Porgera (Jersey) Limited, owned 50/50 by Barrick and Zijin: Barrick Annual Report, 2025).

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Who holds the equity in the Porgera mine

Per cent of equity since the December 2023 restart

Profit is shared on a different basis from equity. Under the economic benefit sharing arrangement, Barrick and Zijin together receive 47% of the mine’s economic benefits and the PNG stakeholders receive 53%. Barrick’s share of those benefits is 23.5%. Barrick said at the restart that, at an assumed gold price of US$1,800 per ounce, the PNG share was expected to exceed US$7 billion over a projected 20-year mine life (Barrick press release, 10 December 2023). That is a forward-looking company estimate, not a result.

Before 2020, Barrick and Zijin each held 47.5% of the mine and a landowner group held 5% (Reuters via Mining.com, August 2019). That structure ended with the 2023 restart.

How much gold does Porgera produce?

Barrick reports Porgera on an equity basis, because it does not control the mine. Its statements therefore show two numbers: the whole mine (100% basis) and Barrick’s 24.5% share. The chart below uses the 100% basis. In 2024, the first year after the restart, the mine produced 188,000 ounces. In 2025 it produced 376,000 ounces, and the first half of 2026 was 172,000 ounces (79,000 in the first quarter and 94,000 in the second), according to Barrick’s quarterly mine statistics (Q4 2025; Q2 2026).

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Gold produced at Porgera, whole mine

Thousand ounces, 100% basis (H1 2026 is six months)

In early 2024 PNG’s Mineral Resources Authority (MRA) reported that New Porgera Limited expected to reach a nameplate rate above 500,000 ounces a year, or 41,000 ounces a month, by July 2024 (MRA ministerial update on the mining sector, 2024). The 2025 total of 376,000 ounces is below that target, so the ramp-up has been slower than first planned.

On Barrick’s 24.5% share, 2025 output was 92,000 ounces, at the upper end of the 70,000 to 95,000 ounce guidance range. For 2026 Barrick guides to 80,000 to 100,000 attributable ounces (Barrick Annual Report, 2025). That range equals about 327,000 to 408,000 ounces for the whole mine (our calculation: attributable ounces divided by 0.245).

For scale, Barrick’s 2025 mine statistics list Carlin at 1,116,000 ounces, Cortez at 739,000 and Kibali at 674,000 on a 100% basis. Porgera’s 376,000 ounces is below all six mines in the table that follows, so claims that it is the world’s second-largest gold mine do not match the company’s own figures.

The table below sets Porgera beside six other gold mines in Barrick’s 2025 full-year statistics, to show where it sits in the group.

Source: Barrick Q4 2025 mine statistics. AISC is a Barrick-defined non-GAAP measure and mine-level figures are not audited sector benchmarks.

Porgera reserves and ore grade

A mineral reserve is the part of a deposit that a company has shown can be mined at a profit with current methods and prices. Grade is the amount of gold in the rock, measured in grams per tonne (g/t). Barrick’s reserve statement at 31 December 2025 lists, on its 24.5% share, 14 million tonnes of ore at 3.15 g/t for 1.4 million ounces. The open pit (“surface”) holds 10 million tonnes at 2.38 g/t (0.78 million ounces) and the underground mine holds 3.7 million tonnes at 5.26 g/t (0.63 million ounces) (Barrick Annual Report, 2025).

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Reserve grade by mine section

Grams of gold per tonne, proven and probable, 31 December 2025

Dividing the attributable ounces by 0.245 gives roughly 5.7 million ounces for the whole mine (our calculation, rounded). The underground ore is more than twice the grade of the surface ore, which is why underground mining matters to the cost picture below.

Porgera cost per ounce

Gold miners quote cost per ounce in three ways. Cost of sales is the accounting cost of the gold sold. Total cash costs cover mining, processing, site overhead and royalties. All-in sustaining costs (AISC) add the capital needed to keep the mine running. Barrick defines the last two as non-GAAP measures, so compare them only with other miners that use the same definition.

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Porgera unit costs, Barrick-reported

US$ per ounce sold

For 2025 Barrick reported Porgera at US$1,553 per ounce cost of sales, US$1,184 total cash costs and US$1,630 AISC. In the first half of 2026 the same measures were US$1,786, US$1,366 and US$1,777, higher on every line (Barrick Q2 2026 mine statistics). Barrick’s 2026 guidance for the mine is US$1,610 to US$1,780 AISC.

Porgera timeline from 1990 to the restart

Doré is the unrefined gold-silver alloy a mine pours before sending it to a refinery.

Where is Porgera and how is the ore processed?

The mine sits in Enga Province in the PNG highlands, about 130 km west-northwest of Mount Hagen and 600 km northwest of Port Moresby, at 2,200 to 2,700 metres above sea level. A 2012 technical report for Barrick lists high rainfall (average 3,650 mm a year), steep terrain, seismic activity and a remote location as the main site challenges (Roscoe Postle Associates NI 43-101 report, 2012).

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Porgera processing in 4 steps

1. 1Mine and crushOre comes from the open pit and underground and is ground fine.
2. 2Gravity and flotationFree gold is caught by gravity; sulphide minerals carrying gold are floated into a concentrate.
3. 3Autoclave oxidationThe concentrate is oxidised under pressure to open the sulphide minerals that lock in the gold.
4. 4Cyanide leach and pourGold is dissolved, captured on carbon and poured as doré bars.

The gold is linked to the Late Miocene Porgera Intrusive Complex, an igneous body emplaced near a collision zone between the Australian craton edge and an island arc, and gold formed within about a million years of that magmatism (Richards and others, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta). The same 2012 report describes the deposit as largely refractory: much of the gold is locked inside sulphide minerals, so cyanide alone cannot dissolve it, and the ore needs extra treatment first. Processing uses gravity recovery and flotation, followed by autoclaves and cyanide leaching.

▶ A clay-animation walk through how gold is mined and refined, from rock to bar. · 5:27

Environmental and community impacts at Porgera

The best-documented issue is how tailings are handled. Tailings are the ground-up waste left after the gold is extracted. As of the 2012 technical report, Porgera discharged treated tailings into the river system, a method that report calls uncommon for large mines. It says the PNG government and the mine’s operators chose it during original permitting as the lowest-risk option, citing the difficulty of building a stable tailings dam on steep, earthquake-prone ground. A cyanide destruction plant was added in 2008 and a paste backfill plant in 2011, which puts part of the tailings back underground (Roscoe Postle Associates, 2012).

Human Rights Watch, in a 2011 report, put the discharge at about six million tons of liquid tailings a year into the Porgera River and called the practice inconsistent with industry good practice. The same report documented violent abuses by mine security staff in 2009 and 2010, and also noted conflict with illegal miners and mercury use by small-scale miners in the area (Human Rights Watch, Gold’s Costly Dividend, 2011). In 2012 Barrick set up an independent remedy framework for historical sexual assault claims, run by in-country experts outside the company (Barrick letter to the UN human rights office, 2015).

These reports describe the period before the 2023 restart. No river monitoring results from after the restart had been published by October 2026. Current data would come from the operator or PNG’s Conservation and Environment Protection Authority.

Employment and local spending are the benefits side. The ownership changes were designed to send more of the proceeds to the landowners and the provincial and national governments. Whether that is felt locally depends on how the benefit funds are spent.

Public Sentinel-2 satellite images, at 10 metres per pixel, can show how a pit, waste dump or cleared area grows between dates. They show change in land cover, not water chemistry. For a licence of your own, Farmonaut offers a satellite-based mineral detection screen, or you can request a quote.

▶ A plain-language claymation on the seven environmental impacts of mining. · 2:31

What the restart means for Papua New Guinea

Not all gold around Porgera comes from the mine. PNG’s mining regulator estimates that some 200,000 artisanal miners work alluvial deposits across the country with pans and sluices, recovering about 120,000 ounces a year (MRA, 2024). Human Rights Watch describes the same pattern around Porgera, where small-scale and illegal miners work in and around the mine’s waste dumps. Safety, licensing and mercury are real problems in that sector, and anyone working there should only operate with the landowner’s permission and a valid licence, and never use mercury.

When the mine restarted, the MRA listed two items still to finish: a Community Development Agreement and compensation agreements with affected landowners, including riverine communities downstream (MRA, 2024). Since then, New Porgera Limited announced in December 2024 that it had signed long-term compensation agreements with landholder agents for 14 of its 15 tenements that require compensation, replacing the interim agreements from late 2023 (NBC PNG, 9 December 2024). The Community Development Agreement was at an advanced stage in the MRA’s March 2024 update and was still pending as of late 2025.

PNG’s gold output fell when Porgera closed. The MRA reported a five-year average of 2.4 million ounces a year, and said production dropped from more than 2 million ounces to about 1.3 million ounces a year after the closure (MRA ministerial update, 2024). The MRA expected national gold output to average around 2.5 million ounces a year by 2026 with Porgera reopened and the K92 mine expansion complete.

For other PNG operations and ways to follow the sector, see our guides to gold mines in Papua New Guinea, the top gold mining companies by production ounces and the top gold producing countries. Several explorers working in PNG list on the Australian exchange; see our list of leading Australian mining companies.

How to read Porgera numbers

Three checks avoid the most common mistakes. First, find out whether a figure is for the whole mine or for one owner’s share: Barrick’s 92,000 ounces for 2025 and the mine’s 376,000 ounces are the same year. Second, separate reserves (economic today) from resources (a wider estimate). Third, remember that AISC is a company-defined measure that excludes tax, financing and the PNG stakeholders’ benefit share.

The calculator below turns the mine’s output and Barrick’s cost figures into an attributable gross value. It is a simple illustration with an example gold price, not a forecast or a valuation.

We cover a connected topic in Uranium Miners in Australia: Mines, Owners, Output.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Porgera now?

New Porgera Limited is 51% owned by PNG stakeholders and 49% by Barrick Niugini Limited. BNL is a 50/50 venture of Barrick and Zijin Mining, so each holds 24.5% (Barrick Annual Report, 2025).

Is Porgera open?

Yes. The mine was on care and maintenance from 25 April 2020 until 22 December 2023, poured its first gold after the restart on 23 February 2024 and produced 172,000 ounces in the first half of 2026 (Barrick, MRA).

How much gold did Porgera produce?

376,000 ounces on a 100% basis, of which Barrick’s 24.5% share was 92,000 ounces (Barrick Q4 2025 mine statistics).

Who operates the mine?

Barrick Niugini Limited operates it for New Porgera Limited.

Where is the mine?

In Enga Province in the PNG highlands, about 600 km northwest of Port Moresby, at 2,200 to 2,700 metres above sea level (Roscoe Postle Associates, 2012).

How big are Porgera’s gold reserves?

Barrick reports 1.4 million ounces on its 24.5% share at 31 December 2025, at 3.15 g/t, which is roughly 5.7 million ounces for the whole mine by our calculation.

What does it cost to produce an ounce at Porgera?

Barrick reported all-in sustaining costs of US$1,630 per ounce for 2025 and US$1,777 for the first half of 2026. These are company-defined, non-GAAP figures.

Is Porgera the second-largest gold mine in the world?

No. On Barrick’s 2025 figures, Porgera (376,000 ounces) produced far less than Carlin (1,116,000) or Cortez (739,000), so the claim is wrong.

How is Porgera’s tailings handled?

Treated tailings go into the river system, a method chosen at permitting and described in the 2012 technical report as uncommon for large mines. A paste backfill plant stores part of the tailings underground.

Did Zijin buy into Porgera?

Zijin owns half of Barrick Niugini Limited, which gives it an indirect 24.5% interest in the mine.

Can I find gold near Porgera with satellite data?

Satellites cannot see gold itself. They map the alteration minerals and structures around deposits, which helps shortlist ground for field work. Any result is an exploration target, not a resource estimate.