How is it determined that a mine has run out of gold?
In: 7119
Can I sell the gold for more than it cost to extract? Yes – keep mining. No – sell the asset
(or in the case of Western Australia – put the site into care and maintenance/exploration mode with 1-2 people onsite until the price spikes or someone offers you a big cash payout)
ELI going into a job about gold –
Basically gold occurs underground naturally as a result of material being pushed up from below. It gets deposited in cracks in the rock. This becomes a gold vein. Sometimes you find surface deposits. Sometimes underground.
You basically dig it up, crush it, use cyanide to leach it out. A mine will typically do anywhere between 1gram/tonne and 140g+/tonne (rich underground deposit, walls literally glisten)
You basically calculate the cost to do it all. And if it’s less than the gold price, happy days keep on mining.
You don’t really run out of gold, and for that matter, any resource. It just becomes not economical to extract.
A chemist once told me, think about it. How do ‘use up’ an element. You can’t. Only a black hole can destroy it. So really… you can’t expended it. Just convert it. Just not possible to use/destroy. We haven’t even touched undersea mining. 2/3 of the planet not even scratched. Most countries don’t even bother exploring becuase resources aren’t really scarce. Just underdeveloped.
Fun fact -there’s 27,000,000 metric tons of gold just in seawater. 150x all the gold humanity has ever mined. We’ve also never been below about 1-2km for mining gold. Becuase at that depth temps get above 100dec C. However, we can autonomous mine it, just we haven’t been bothered. There’s so much gold, ‘rare earth’ minerals we can go on forever honestly. And that’s IF we don’t mine space.
Here’s a fun site that shows you how incalculable how many resources are available to us as a society.
https://www.asterank.com/
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