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To: carranza2 who wrote (94971)9/25/2012 3:46:51 AM
From: TobagoJack2 Recommendations  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 220182
 
... and mq thinks the money-printing central banks are or shall get tired

i think the banks shall eventually print dedicated paper to specifically buy true physical gold, assuming the guilty central banks do not instead confiscate gold

to the extent gold extraction is energy intensive, yes, gold is made out of oil, gas, coal, electricity, ball bearings in dump trucks, etc etc

gold in effect, as is platinum, is a storage of today's energy for tomorrow's bargaining



To: carranza2 who wrote (94971)9/25/2012 4:28:57 AM
From: Maurice Winn8 Recommendations  Respond to of 220182
 
Yes C2, gold is made out of oil. You can do it in two ways. One is to do some nuclear fusion of the hydrogen and carbon atoms in the oil and the other is the more common method which is by way of garden variety Newtonian thermodynamics and chemistry. TJ is using the second method.

I have been the oil [fuels and lubricants] supplier to the various stages of gold production from oil by the second method. I loved the gold production process [as an oil supplier].

First, you get some geologists to find some dirt with oil in it and some other dirt with ferrous oxides. There's a bit of a chicken and egg situation because you need the oil to get the iron and you need the iron to get the oil. So the chickens and eggs started out in the industrial revolution with some very manual coal digging to start with, which enabled some iron production to get under way by digging and smelting iron ore, which enabled picks and shovels to be produced which enabled faster coal excavation which fed the feedback loop so that before you know it, Andew Carnegie was producing megatons of steel which was used by John D Rockefeller to produce petajoules of oil which fed back into more oil and coal and iron ore excavation so pretty soon there was a vast steel and oil industry. We haven't even got to trains and trucks yet, but while all that was going on, the steam engine was invented and before you know it there were transcontinental railway lines with monster steam engines hauling steel, coal, oil, and even some wheat to feed the people who fed the furnaces back in Pittsburgh and across the planet. All that digging required BIG trucks and excavators and fuel and steel and oil and more oil and still more oil.

Those toy trucks and excavations Little Jack has are copies of dirty great monsters made of a lot of steel, each ton of which required several tons of oil to excavate, transport, smelt and roll and bend and weld into trucks. Then the greedy monsters must be fed every day and they have BIG fuel tanks requiring very regular supplies of oil. Just the lubricants in a monster truck come by the barrel.

Now they are up to the gold stage. Back to the geologists who are set to work to locate some quartz with gold. Then more excavation using those huge excavators and trucks made of oil and fueled by even more oil. I have watched the dirty great trucks climbing way up out of the Martha Mine in Waihi [NZ] which is a town I have been through hundreds of times over many decades.


When hauling coal out of mines, the trucks are pretty much full of coal, so the payload is quite pure. They do have to do some overburden removal at times so it's not all coal. But with gold out of Martha Mine, it's nearly all rock. They cart megatons of rock way way way up out of the bottom of the mine to get the ounce of gold that might be in each load [if they have "struck gold" in the current mining area].

I haven't calculated exactly how much oil goes into making an ounce of gold by method 2, but it's quite a lot. At $1500 an ounce wholesale price for gold, I guess the excavation cost up to making bars is about $1000 an ounce. At $100 a barrel, that's only 10 barrels of oil to make one ounce of gold.

It's certainly easier to carry an ounce of gold than 10 barrels of oil. Storage space is less too. You can even hide an ounce of gold, but tucking 10 barrels of oil in the lining of a suitcase is more difficult. It also exceeds airline weight limits for carry-on making gold a better choice for moving value.

In summary, yes, gold is made out of oil, requiring [boe calculation] 10 barrels of oil to make one ounce of gold.

Your mileage may vary.

Mqurice