"Then they broke a little fragment off a carpenter's grindstone and got a stranger to take it to the popular scientist and get it assayed. In the course of an hour the result came, whereby it appeared that a ton of that rock would yield $1,284.40 in silver and $366.36 in gold!.... Due publication of the whole matter was made in the paper, and the popular assayer left town 'between two days'. "
Ore vs. Mineralization, a Fundamentally Critical Concept
The title of this publication suggests that one cannot obtain gold from water. This is not entirely true. Water, like other natural substances, contains at least trace amounts of all of the [Image] elements found on Earth, including gold. The critical point is that, given current technology, one cannot extract gold profitably from seawater or most other water because the concentration of gold is very small (it has been tried repeatedly, notably by the Germans during World War I to help fund their war machine, unsuccessfully, of course). Very large volumes of water would have to be processed to recover a small amount of gold. It has always cost more to process the water than the value of gold in that water. The more water we process, the more money we lose. If we could find a reservoir of water somewhere that, for some reason, had a much higher concentration of gold than normal, we could indeed make money by extracting gold from water (this is exactly what some promoters try to sell to unwitting investors). This is akin to the concept of an orebody (which can be profitably worked) as compared to mere mineralization (which cannot currently be worked profitably). Let's analyze this critical concept further.
Natural processes recurring over the history of the Earth have caused some minerals to become concentrated in extraordinary amounts in rocks in certain places. These areas of concentration of minerals are where we go to extract minerals at a profit. Finding areas of exceptional mineral concentration is the realm of prospecting or mineral exploration.
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In order for the extraction of minerals to be profitable, the proper minerals generally must be:
Highly concentrated by natural processes,
Located in rocks near the Earth's surface,
Located in an environmentally insensitive spot, with relatively easy access, with water available, power not too far away, inexpensive transportation available to ship the extracted minerals, in an area of hospitable climate, etc. This type of mineralization is referred to as an orebody because the minerals constituting ore can be processed and sold for a profit.
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The discrimination between mere mineralization and an orebody requires three-dimensional information about the volume of mineral-rich rock available for extraction. This requires drilling, tunneling, or trenching, combined with sampling the rocks and assaying them. This is the only way to determine how many tons of mineralized rock are present and what concentrations of the metals are present. After calculating the value of the minerals in the ground, we must determine the costs to extract a certain percentage of the minerals from the ore (it is generally not possible to extract 100% of the ore mineral). The value of the minerals in the ground minus the costs to extract the minerals, minus the up-front costs of prospecting and constructing and permitting the mine, minus the end costs to decommission the mine and reclaim the area, tells us how much net profit might be available to earn over the life of the mine. Only at this point can we rationally make a decision whether to pursue the project or investment. It can be very expensive to get to this decision point, and most individuals cannot afford to get there on their own.
Some Recurring Assaying Scams
The assaying scams are essentially· limited to the precious metals, largely gold, silver, platinum, and rhodium. There are reasons for this. Many elements are mined from the Earth, but only the very valuable elements (precious metals) can be profitably mined at very low concentrations in their ores (see the table below for relative values of precious metals and base metals). At these very low concentrations, the precious metals or minerals are generally very finely and widely dispersed throughout the rock. They are so finely dispersed that they are often difficult or impossible to see with conventional microscopes even when their concentrations are high enough to be mined profitably. This forces us to rely on the results of chemical assays to determine whether economic concentrations of these precious metals are present, without being able to verify their presence with a microscope. This is where the incompetent and the unscrupulous find fruitful ground to err, to misconstrue, and to deceive. These problems and scams do not arise with other metals because the erroneous or fraudulent assay results could quickly be verified or dismissed through microscopic examination of the ore by a competent mineralogist, either professional or amateur.
While the salting of samples (covertly adding a small amount of metal to a sample that a potential investor would then have assayed) still occurs, it has not been tried on samples that I have received for verification assaying. It is not difficult to tell microscopically the difference between the manner in which nature and man normally add precious metals to rocks. Knowing this, Bre-X employees, in manipulating the apparent gold grades in drilling samples from the Busang prospect, blended in small portions of very high-grade natural ore material from other properties with the Busang samples. This made the Busang samples appear to be moderately mineralized with gold and effectively delayed the discovery of salting of the samples for years.
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