Well we seen the deep oil drilling but what about mining.

Rob Keeble

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GTA Ontario Canada
Thought some might like to know about where that gold you wear comes from.

Just for interest sake seeing as how i come from the city of gold as it is sometimes called and I married a mine engineers daughter. :D

South Africa has the deepest Gold mine in the world.

This is a new mine relatively speaking and bottomed out (which ever way you wish to look at it) the previous one by an additional few meters.

Place is called Tau Tona Mine depth 3.8KM approx 2.36 miles down

Previous Mine that was famous and still going is ERPM ( East Rand Mine btw i grew up in their backyard just about) its depth max depth is 3.5km or 2.18 miles down.

Deepest i been in my time.....220m (chicken man).

More interesting is the tonnage they have to mine to get a gram of gold and the cost of production of that gram

Note we typically refer to an ounce of gold. Its normally troy ounces and there are 31 grams roughly to one ounce

So Tau Tona harvests around 7 to 8 grams per ton of rock taken to the surface and processed today with modern processing methods.

ERPM today yields around 1.1 grams a ton and declining.

Cost to produce the $559 per ounce. at Tau Tona and sold for average of $974 during the period of 2009 yet due to the financial hedging these guys do only ended up being $751.

At ERPM its a mess though. At that low yield its a joke to mine and it was closed down in 2008/9 Their cost to produce grew so high their was no net gain.


Factor in todays gold price for spot is around $1163 per ounce. Now who is making money?
 
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Interesting info Rob. I remember watching a discovery show about the mines. Due to the geothermal conditions around those mines, the temperatures of the mines have to be cooled for the workers otherwise they'd be an average of 55C (131F) or warmer.
 
Before I moved out to California, I was part owner (along with my sister, her husband, and another couple of good friends) of about 440 acres of old gold mine claims on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in the mountains about an hour from Albuquerque. (Google Bland, NM. We didn't own the ghost town, but a lot of land around it.) These were old claims from the turn of the 20th century, and they were given to us by a retired couple who were no longer able to handle the upkeep. The BLM allowed us exclusive access to the land (meaning we could lock the gates and keep others out), but back then claimholders were required to do $100 worth of mining or maintenance to each of the 44 claims or else it would revert back to BLM control. Although the area had been productive in the late 1800s, by the time we owned it in the mid '80s, assays indicated that gold would need to be above $400 per ounce before it would be profitable to mine any more. (It was somewhere around $300 at the time, as I recall.) We had no intentions of mining up there. Our main interest was the old log cabin that was on one of the claims. We did all the maintenance work just to have access to the cabin, and it was worth it. Still, if gold prices would have gone up, we would have considered leasing the rights to a mining company and making some money on the side. There were a number of old mines on our claims, but none were nearly as deep as the ones you grew up around, Rob. ;)

A few years after I moved west, the Hanta virus outbreak hit that area hard. My fellow co-owners went up to the cabin that spring after the snows melted and saw that the winter mouse invasion had been particularly strong that year. (Hanta can be spread via rodent droppings.) They decided that year that it wasn't worth the risk to themselves or their kids, so they abandoned the claims and let the BLM take the land back. I sometimes wonder if it would be profitable these days to mine in that area, or if the costs to do so have risen in step with gold prices. :rolleyes:
 
Vaughn my guess is someone is making a killing on that land today. But it aint certain when you think about costs in the USA.

Dont forget the rate of exchange between the Rand to the US dollar provides the same kind of labor differential to that of cheap labor in similar parts of the world. What affects them in SA is the cost of capital goods which weighs in heavy in mining and the cost of money which is practically free in the USA but goes for a steep price in SA. Example in a non related industry but indicative is the mortgage rate there right now is around 13% at a time when long term fix rates here in Canada are around 5.5%. Thats the reason there is a substantial mining equipment manufacturing industry in the country something i was reminded of frequently when i went in search of money for the tech sector.:)

You ever checked up whats happened to the land Vaughn?
 
That's a great picture, John. :thumb:

Vaughn my guess is someone is making a killing on that land today...

In this case, no. Those were unpatented mining claims, so we didn't own title to the land, just the mining rights. When we gave them up, the land became BLM/Forest Service land for public use. In that same canyon, though, were a number of patented claims, and in those cases, the claim holders also hold title to the land, and can sell it. According to this page, those plots are selling for $3000 to $5000 per acre. (Man, I would have loved for our 440 acres to have been patented claims.)

Seeing the pics on that page bring back a lot of memories. This is the Jones' cabin. Mr. amd Mrs. Jones are the folks who gave us the unpatented claims. (They kept the patented claims, and now that they've both passed away, apparently their sons are selling them)

bland68_lg.jpg


First time I visited Bland Canyon, I stayed in that cabin with my brother-in-law. (The Joneses weren't there.) I nearly burned the place down using Coleman fuel to start the woodstove. Shot a ball of fire nearly all the way across the living room. :eek: :doh:

This is one of the old mills, also on one of the Jones' patented claims:

bland65.jpg
bland66.jpg


This mill was a leach mill, where they soaked the crushed ore in cyanide to leach the gold out of it. Inside the mill were a couple of very large wooden vats that the leaching was done in. Back in the late '80s, the Joneses had the fence put up around the mill to keep trespassers out. The building was in danger of collapsing, and they didn't want the liability of someone getting hurt in there. There was also an old ball mill in the canyon (no pics) that was built a bit before WWII.

This is Effie's cabin. I never had a chance to meet her, but she apparently lived in the canyon for much of her life, including the snowed-in winters.

bland78.jpg


Another landmark of the area was the old hotel. I can't find any pics of it, but by the time we were going up there, the hotel was occupied by a grizzly old biker/firewood cutter named Lucky Ball. Anyone who made it past the three locked gates into the canyon also had to make it past Lucky and his guns. ;) We got to be friends with him, and he'd just wave as us as we'd drive past his place. We made big points with him one spring by taking him a chocolate cake. He'd been snowed in all winter, and was real glad to have some company and some goodies to eat.

I don't have any pics of our cabin. It was a simple two-room affair with an attic above that could sleep a dozen people. Both the kitchen and living room had woodstoves for heat. The outside walls were hand-hewn square cut logs. I don't know when the cabin was built, but we had graffiti carved on the front door dated 1917. When we took it over it was in pretty bad shape, but we did a lot of cleanup and fix-up, and turned it into a great (albeit rustic) weekend getaway. Good times, indeed. :rolleyes:
 
I had to go down in a cement mine one time on a consulting job. The mine was in Colton, California which is 1000 ft above sea level. We drove down in a pickup truck and the driver told me that we went below sea level, the was water coming out of the ceiling. I was told that the water was from the water table, we were below it. :eek:
 
Rob,
Very interesting, I knew that South Africa had the largest gold mines in the world and that they were pretty deep.

I had an opportunity to visit the highest gold mine in the world... The next largest gold mine outside of South Africa is the Minera Yanacocha mine in Peru... it's on a mountain that WAS about 15,000 feet high... it is a strip mine and now I think the mountain is just over 14,000 feet.... and I gotta tell you, for a flat lander from Houston, which is at or below sea level, it's hard to breath and walk at the same time at that altitude.... the locals were doing hard labor, but it was hard labor for me to walk up a flight of 12 steps.

I don't know what the price of gold was at the time I was there, but the operators told me that their costs per ounce of gold was about $90. That's even with shipping almost all of their operating equipment from Houston and around the world to Lima and trucking into the mountains... I moved all of their equipment from all around the world...
 
I remember reading not that long ago that if you took all the gold that has ever been mined wouldn't fill a 50 foot square box. :dunno::eek:

I don't think that is likely. There is a frequently replayed documentary about Fort Knox, the only one showing the inside, that shows enough gold bars to fill many hundreds, or maybe even thousands of 50'X50' boxes.
 
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