I discover a ore which contains 0.009% of gold so i like to know if it is good to invest or if it is useless?

Question

I discover a ore which contains 0.009% of gold so i like to know if it is good to invest or if it is useless?

Answer 1

That's kinda weak. It would be very expensive to recover especially with the environmental restrictions. The best way to recover micro gold is a cyanide heap leach. With todays fuel prices and the mandatory environmental impact report and recovery I think the costs would outweigh any profit.

Answer 2

gold closed today at $878.50 an ounce

if you have one ounce of ore that's $7.91, so if you have about that much probably not, but if you have a lot more, than maybe.

Answer 3

A ton of your ore contains about $160 worth of gold at today's prices.  The cost of open pit mining and heap leaching (cyanide) is about $125-$150 per ton.  So, you are only slightly profitable at 0.009%.  I'd pass since there are likely better opportunities out there than this one.

Answer 4

It's not worth your investment.  It would take a lot of energy (and money) to extract that trace amount of gold, most likely more than you'd make off of the small amount of gold.

Answer 5

that is 90 grams per tonne of rock.  That is extremely rich.  Ore grades in some active mines can be on the order of several grams per tonne only.  However, a word of caution, it is not unusual to get an anomalous result due to the nugget effect.  That is, a sample has a large gold grain and gives an unusually high value for concentration.  To evaluate a mine, you need to look at tonnage and average grade.  You also need to look at recovery-what percentage of the gold in the ore is easily collected by standard techniques.  Secondary metal recovery can also help.  In fact, it usually works the other way-a marginal base metal deposit (zinc or copper, say) can become worthwhile to mine by the presence of small amounts of gold that can be recovered along with the base metal.  The base metal pays for the mine, the gold is the profit.

Answer 6

There are many variables used by geologists to evaluate a mineral deposit. Its not just the grade, we also look at the size (measured in tons), byproduct metals such as silver or copper, toxic components like mercury or arsenic, geometry, stripping ratio, rock mechanics, infrastucture, water sources, environmental impacts, metallurgy, etc.

You quote 0.009% Au grade, I assume that is by weight.  We never measure gold grade in %, its always in ppm, g/t or oz/t.  0.009% is equivalent to 90 g/t or 2.6 oz/t.  The current gold price is about US $900/oz, so you've got rock worth about $2350 per ton. That is very high grade.

But you need to consider the many other factors affecting economics before you can make a good investment decision. If its only a one ton of rock located 100's of km from the nearest road, then its not worth recovering.

By the way, its not ore until its proven to be recoverable at a profit.