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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Charters who wrote (80409)	12/31/2001 5:46:44 PM
From: Don Lloyd	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116815

EC - Seawater Gold, both dissolved and colloidal, dwarfs all other sources. Fritz Haber, the great inventor of Nitrate synthesis (for explosives etc.. ), was involved with the German gov't trying to come up with an economic means of electrolytically precipitating it to pay off Germany's war debt after WW1. His own estimate, he thought was wrong after trying, as he was unable to get paying quantities. It depends on whether you think there is -- 0.15 cents per cu meter or 15.0 cents gold per cubic meter. Old methods of determination circa 1950 may have only counted the dissolved gold in seater. This is overshadowed by the colloidal component which is very hard to test for in these concentrations. There are 1.016 time 10 to the 17th dollars in Gold in the sea, by the latter figure. Ten thousand-million-million dollars. (10 thousand trillion) Or 1000 times the United State's GNP. We could say roughly 330 trillion ounces, or 11 billion, 600 million tons of gold, avoirdupois. It might be worth going after. Recent developments in carbon precipitation and keyhole esters indicate that extremely small quantities of metals can be profitable taken directly from very weak solutions for payback returns. Doing this on seawater has the advantage of producing large quantities of magnesium and other valuable salts, about every other metal known to man, in addition to gallons of pure water. It all pays well and would probably defray the costs in gold alone. It is no sinecure as a large plant has to be built and margins are guite small. Markets for all products have to be sought. Still it seems to be a good business proposition. Eventually most of our pure water will come from such plants. I know a scientist who has many patents for related processes and is involved in a company that approaches this from the pollutions control angle. Much of the efficacy of these methods was developed in only the last three or less years. Thanks for the detailed information. Except for the water, it would seem that this potential business would have many of the disadvantages of mining, without the benefit of property rights. It may be a lack of imagination on my part, but I suspect that most metals are already so economized in use, and require so much additional processing to utilize, that their demand will exhibit relatively little elasticity below current prices, and that even a minimal level of competition will drive prices down deleteriously for the extractors. Even if platinum were to approach being free, the cost of an automobile wouldn't go down enough to greatly expand the total quantity of platinum used in automobiles. Regards, Don