Simandou Iron Ore and Trans-Guinean Rail and Port Project

Simandou was discovered in the 1990s and spent nearly thirty years as the most valuable iron ore deposit nobody could ship. The obstacle was never the geology, which is 1.5 billion tonnes of reserve at 65 to 66 percent iron. It was that the ore sits 600 kilometres from the Atlantic behind a mountain range in a country with no heavy-haul railway.

Project Scope

The answer was to build the railway. 552.5 kilometres of main line from the Morebaya river port to the Simandou range, plus spurs, held through La Compagnie du TransGuineen, a vehicle incorporated in 2022 and owned 42.5 percent each by the two mining consortia with the Republic of Guinea free-carried at 15 percent. Two new Atlantic ports, including a 60 million tonne per year barge wharf. Co-developed rail and port capital alone is USD 8.8 billion inside a system commonly reported at around USD 20 billion.

Rio Tinto’s Simfer holds Blocks 3 and 4 through a Jersey vehicle owned 53 percent by Rio Tinto and 47 percent by Chalco Iron Ore Holdings, itself a Chinalco, Baowu, CRCC and China Harbour combination. Winning Consortium Simandou holds Blocks 1 and 2. SYSTRA carries rail engineering management and assurance. Mota-Engil took the early works in July 2023, China Railway 18th Bureau Group built the Simfer spur, and Wabtec supplied Evolution Series ES43ACmi locomotives under a USD 277 million order from Simfer and a separate USD 248 million order from WCS.

First ore was crushed on 1 January 2025. Ore first ran the corridor on 11 November 2025 and the first 200,000-tonne cargo sailed in December. The Simfer rail branch was completed in May 2026, ahead of schedule. Combined system capacity at full ramp is 120 million tonnes a year, reached over roughly 30 months.

Why It Matters

This is the largest new source of seaborne iron ore in decades, and it lands into a market where the incumbent suppliers are Australian and Brazilian. The IMF has projected a roughly 25 percent increase in Guinean GDP off the back of it.

For the construction side, the interest is the delivery model. A state-participating infrastructure vehicle sitting above competing mining consortia, with EPC packages let beneath it, is an unusual structure and it produced a railway across mountainous terrain in about four years. Simfer redesigned the mine to avoid critical Western Chimpanzee habitat and is building animal underpasses and buffer zones against IFC Performance Standard 6. A contractor employee died at the Simfer mine site near Nzerekore in August 2025.

Project Team & Details