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

To: Graystone who wrote (91725)	12/11/2002 12:17:49 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116805

Reminds me of that old country song about divorce, "My wife got the gold mine, I got the shaft." It has long been interesting to speculate the vast gold sources of the Madres des Oros Mts of Australian California shed their fine gold particulates and dissolved gold species into the eastern deserts, there to precipitate in the salty planes. It makes chemical sense that it may. Drilling for oil in Utah and these desert planes did show solution chemistry of gold. It has also been reported by reputable scientific publications that gold does form clusters in silica that are so tiny that they evade ordinary detection or recovery. It may also be possible to activate these clusters by HEMW to break out on sufficiently fine grinding. It is however a daunting task and fraught with danger in trying to keep it proprietary. Questions of economics loom large. An ideal field for the not so concerned with failure of the methodology. Believability wanes fast in these nacht und knebel atmospheres. Since 1970 however we know of scientists experimenting with MW and salt precipitation from water of metals in the Utah area. All hush hush. It does not help that the world's centers for phony assaying has been Phoenix and Scottsdale for 100 years. It has been more adequately established that millions of tons of gold and precious metals is dissolved in the sea. No less a chemist than Fritz Haber of nitrate process fame proposed paying off Germany's war debt by elctrolytically precipitating gold. He carried out experiments, but found the energy required was slightly valuable than the gold circa 1928 or so. It may be possible with recent advancements of surface technologies, membranes and a better knowledge of the species involved (the greater component of the gold is not dissolved, but colloidal, making it hard to test for..) to get a better payback today. There are many metals and salts dissolved and particulate in sea water. One that is routinely extracted profitably, (the sea is the chief source of the metal) is magnesium. The salts are also salable as is the resultant pure water. In fact the water and magnesium would more than pay the gold and 8 other precious metals' electrolysis. So all in all it is not such a money losing proposition, if tackled correctly. The chief problem to tackle is not gross energy payback but specie separation of salt precip vs energy electrolysis and other precip and membrane keyhole techniques. There are other source of gold however that are much more concentrated, benefit from advances in methods in the last 30 years, and are much easier to prove and have more palpable economics for far less research cost. These are already established high grade gold deposits that were not mined since the 1960's gold price falls, known gold sunken and buried treasure deposits that are now easy to locate with remote sensing that has found the Titanic and Bismarck, and placer and tailings pond gold deposits that yield to relatively high gold prices today, much better techniques, cheaper equipment and better recovery devices. Right now with limited proof, it is possible to use 1930's chemical recovery technology, cheap diesel equipment and late developed abatement technology to very comfortably produce from a wide range of deposits of surface and underground gold. The biggest problem facing the miner today is not the technical or engineering problem but the financial one aggravated by the almost comical failure of seemingly highly expert groups that just did not know what they were doing overall. Case in point, Eastmaque, Erocon, SNC Lavalin et al. How do you tell people that despite a lack of evidence that trusting certain "experts" is a bad idea but trusting you is a good one? I know many mines that would succeed today. Telling people how they would without giving the game away is the hard part. You need to be a financial chicken before you become a money egg. And be tarred and feathered when all the other chickens are laying eggs and crowing about, that is to be pecked unmercifully. Seed is getting hard to find. Columbus languished in port awaiting tide from the court of Isabella. EC<:-}