Where is all the Gold?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17159/Abstract
The Witwatersrand Basin contains by far the most gold ever found, and has hosted continuous mining from its discovery in 1886 to the present. For many years, South Africa was the world’s larges producer of gold, nearly all of which came from the Witwatersrand. Since 2000 South Africa has fallen back several positions because of declining gold output. There are many complex and varied reasons for this; however declining gold resources in the Witwatersrand Basin is not one of them. As far as the author knows, there are no qualified estimates of gold remaining in the Witwatersrand Basin as a whole in the literature; this paper attempts an estimate of remaining gold by collecting mining data from various sources for the period 1887 to 2006, and using error analysis to estimate and account for gold remaining underground, in evaluated ore resources, and in dumps. Records to 2006 show that 48,300 tonnes of gold were produced by Witwatersrand mines, and extrapolating from this point to the end of 2019, it is estimated that a further 48,400 tonnes of gold remain underground, both inside and outside mine leases. Much of this gold will remain inaccessible to future mining if the current methods continue to be employed. In order to win this prize, the mining industry will have to rethink its approach to mining, and to find effective means of preventing gold theft and informal mining, which is on the rise at present.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Matthew Francis Handley
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