DEVELOPMENT AND EVOLUTION OF GEOLOGICAL SURVEY IN SAUDI ARABIA AND PROSPECTS FOR ITS COOPERATION WITH CHINA

To get rid of the sole dependence on oil economy and break the resource bottleneck restricting industrial development, Saudi Arabia put forward"Vision 2030" in 2016 to enhance the contribution of mining to national economic development and made it gradually become the third pillar of the country's industrial transformation. Therefore, Saudi Geological Survey has made a series of strategic deployments for mineral resource exploration. Saudi Geological Survey, responsible for the mineral exploration and development in Saudi Arabia, has sent a few delegations to China for cooperative negotiation and has collaborated with several organizations including China National Nuclear Corporation(CNNC), China National Geological and Mining Corporation (CGM), and China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation(SINOPEC) over the years, which has promoted the cooperation in multiple projects such as the high-precision geochemical survey of steam sediments and heavy minerals in Saudi Arabic Shield, the construction of Saudi rock core library, the uranium-thorium resources investigation in Saudi Arabia, the Al Masane copper-zinc-gold mine, and the Thimphu smelter. In 2020, China Geological Survey won the bid of geochemical survey in Saudi Arabia and construction of core database, conforming again that China's geological survey techniques and methods are recognized internationally, which has laid a solid foundation for the substantive cooperation between geological survey organizations in both countries and enriched the cooperation connotation under the Belt and Road Initiative.