How is it determined that a mine has run out of gold?
In: 7119
I usually determine it when the mine collapses and all my peons are standing around holding a handful of gold and just not doing anything. Just send them all to a new mine, or have them harvest lumber and/or build another barracks or something.
Mines tend to follow exposures (veins for example). They harvest the material and follow the path into the mountain if it’s profitable enough. Eventually it becomes too costly to operate all the equipment nessessary so the mine becomes commercially tapped out as it can no longer run its daily operations at a profit.
There’s a lot of nuance though. Just because a mine isn’t commercially viable doesn’t mean an individual can’t walk away with rare specimens or a big pay day. Not all things make sense to commercially mine as well. Very few companies operate Quartz mines for example as it is an extremely common crystal. Avant mining however is one of the few. They have owned and operated some of the most famous quartz mines and still currently harvest some world class pieces out of Arkansas.
Who knows when those mines with truely run out, but its pretty much certain that even when they do there would still be more that they left behind.
Mines rarely actually run out of gold. It just stops becoming profitable to mine for it. A whole lot of gold gets left around and even disposed of in the process of mining. The goal is efficiency and profitability, not capturing every piece of gold that’s there.
It costs money to move rocks around. For each bucket of ‘waste rock’ you have to recover a certain amount of ‘valuable rock’ (ore).
You never actually run out of gold, you reach a point where the cost to dig it up is more than the value you get.
This is a combination of things like fuel, labor, processing, etc. but ultimately it comes down to just not being worth it to try.
When prices fluctuate it can have a very large influence on the viability of a mine.
There’s never a “run out” just a lack of proven reserves. After finding a profitable vein and establishing a mine, Miners take thousands of core samples running in every direction trying to find other veins from the same area.
If the current proven reserves are exhausted before new profitable veins are located, the mine may be “mothballed” (temporarily closed) while geotechnical does work to locate more reserves.
As you deplete the mine it gets harder and harder to extract more gold, you close down the mine when it costs more to mine the gold than you can sell it for.
When you have a pile of orchish peons loosely hanging about asking if, “something need doing?”
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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