To: TobagoJack who wrote (94648 ) 9/18/2012 7:11:44 PM From: Maurice Winn 1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 217573 Your gold project is interesting TJ and follows directly from our discussions of a decade ago and what the politicians and money producers have done since, backed by their crazed electorates. I predicted a gold culture when $2000 an ounce arrived as a result of political depredations on the stability of US$ but had hoped that they would not continue the process or even accelerate as they have done to the stage where hordes of people take fright and abandon US$ in favour of "safety" in gold and anything else. We have yet to reach the gold standard price I predicted of US$10,000 an ounce but the trend is your friend. In the mean and interesting time: <for my part i must learn the difference between 'ore' and 'oar', and study the similarities between 'gold' and 'bold'. > "bold" is a very popular word these days. Everyone seems to be wanting "bold" initiatives in this that and the other. They invariably ignore the fact that "bold" includes not just the possibility of success [which they expect as an entitlement] but of failure [which they ignore]. They should recall the old saying, "There are bold motorcyclists and old motorcyclists but there are no old, bold, motorcyclists". When yet another person wants bold action, I cringe and look for the exits. In your various learnings about the whole value chain and the difference between sulphide, oxide, sulfide, carbon dioxide, sulphur and sulfur, spare some room for my old industry which drools at the sight of your stack of trucks, excavators, crushers, pumps, cars, transporters and moving parts in general which will require large storage tanks for hydrocarbons to produce carbon dioxide by the ton via your dirty great engines. A quarry was one of my favourite sights. They work long hours and burn tanker loads of fuel and require tribological input galore. Tribology is another word you might grow to love, which oddly, is nothing to do with Aztec tribal rituals, campfire incantations or mystical imprecations to gold gods. It's about less mystical but more financial implications for oil gods with incantations replaced by oaths and curses about "greedy oil companies". It's not far from the truth that gold is actually made out of oil. While the machinery you will use is made of iron, that iron is also extracted from quarries and smelted in giant steel mills which absolutely love oil. It's a kind of transmutation of elements from the carbon dioxide in air, to cellulose, to fish, to oil, to iron, to gold. It's a kind of Maslow's hierarchy of concentration of wealth. If oil is in glut conditions, the price goes down and the cost of iron goes down and the value of gold goes down. If cellulose producers skip the fish to oil step and go straight to iron by using cellulose as fuel, the oil producers will feel left out and have to lower their prices. If CO2 supplies increase, then the cellulose producers will be happy which will put further pressure on the oil owners. By coincidence, CO2 levels are way up and increasing and cellulose is growing flat out. To cut to the chase, oil is expensive and will not be "running out" before Peak People arrives in 2037 and technological advances reduce the amount of oil people have to buy to drive their cars and airliners around. Oil prices are going to fall. Since gold is made of oil, the price of gold will also fall because gold in the long run is priced according to the cost of production and as you have gleefully pointed out, your cost of production is wayyyy lower than the current price [or even $1500 an ounce]. As you have also pointed out, the amount of gold that can be produced is small compared with the tons now on the market, so there can be a panicky spike in price as per 1979 when oil hit $40 a barrel. Oil over the next two decades fell to $10 a barrel and gold bottomed out along with oil [of course] at $280 a barrel [so to speak]. When oil zoomed back up to around $100 an ounce [x 10], it's not surprising that gold shot up to $1727 per barrel [x 7] in sympathy, which implies gold is cheap compared with oil. A hint on saving money on fuel for your dirty great trucks. If they run hot and 24 hours a day, you can burn really cheap sulphurous low cetane number fuel [if you can get it] and it won't hurt the motors [not more than the cost saving in fuel anyway] because it's only when the sulphur oxides soak into water which has condensed when the motor cools to the dew point that acids form and start wrecking the oil and dissolving the metals in the motor. Acid plants in fertilizer producers use pure sulphur to produce sulphur oxide via burning it as fuel in their turbines used to generate electricity and that sulphur oxide is used to produce sulphuric acid which is a feedstock for fertilizer. Incidentally, airliners could run on sulphur too, and pour sulphur oxides into the stratosphere which would reflect sunlight thereby avoiding global warming. Unfortunately, sulphur is heavy so there would be an issue with that as fuel in airliners. But it doesn't explode on impact. Having a short term sale horizon for your gold factory is a good idea - selling it when gold culture really gets going. $4000 an ounce or even $10000 an ounce should get you a good price for such an Aztec quarry and gold producer. Let's see how the fiscal cliff goes. You seem to have an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. That's probably more useful than at the top because the electorate of USA seems determined to jump. Mqurice