Oil and gas: the folded Cenozoic
Pakistan’s petroleum story began in the north. The folded structures of the Potwar Plateau hosted some of the subcontinent’s earliest oil discoveries in the early twentieth century, at fields such as Khaur and Dhulian, where Eocene and older limestones and sands are crumpled into traps against the Himalayan front.
The larger prizes came later and further south. The Sui gas field in Balochistan, discovered in the early 1950s, produces from Eocene limestones and became the backbone of the national gas supply. Across the Middle and Lower Indus Basin, fields including Mari, Kandhkot, Qadirpur and Sui draw on a mix of Eocene carbonate reservoirs and Cretaceous sandstones (notably the Lower Goru sands), sealed beneath thick shales. In every case the essential facts are stratigraphic: a porous reservoir formation, a source rock to charge it, and an impermeable seal above.
Coal: from Salt Range seams to the Thar giant
Coal in Pakistan spans a wide range of quality and age. Paleocene–Eocene beds — the Patala Formation and its equivalents — carry the coals long mined in the Salt Range and the Trans-Indus ranges around Makarwal, and the Lakhra and Sonda fields of Sindh.
By far the largest resource is the Thar coalfield of southern Sindh, hosted in Paleocene strata beneath the desert. It is one of the world’s great lignite deposits, with reserves counted in the tens of billions of tonnes, and it has reshaped national plans for power generation. Its lignite is young, soft and low in rank, but its sheer volume makes it strategically important.
Salt, gypsum and the raw material of cement
The oldest resource of all is the rock salt of the Salt Range Formation, mined at Khewra since antiquity and among the largest salt mines anywhere. The same Precambrian-to-Cambrian evaporite package supplies gypsum, used in cement and plaster. Thick, pure Cenozoic limestones — the Sakesar, Habib Rahi and related units — are quarried across the country as the raw feed for a large cement industry.
Metals of the western arcs
The metallic wealth lies mostly in the west, in the volcanic arcs of Balochistan rather than the layered basins of the east. The Chagai magmatic belt hosts porphyry copper–gold systems; the Saindak deposit is in production, and the much larger Reko Diq system is one of the world’s significant undeveloped copper–gold resources. These ores formed in and around the intrusions of an ancient subduction-related arc — a different geological setting, and a reminder that “stratigraphy” in Pakistan must stretch to include deformed and intruded terranes as well as orderly sedimentary piles.
Why the map underneath matters
Every one of these industries is, at heart, applied stratigraphy. Exploration means predicting where a particular formation lies in the subsurface, how thick and porous it is, and how it connects to neighbouring outcrops and wells. That is the most direct answer to a student’s question of why any of this matters: the rock record is also the resource map.
Browse the formations behind these resources, grouped by what they yield, on the economic geology page.