Night before Christmas and all was quiet, page-4

Thanks Chaps, and Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones!

Final thought re Agate and NZ, for the festive season:

Gold Grade Is King

Thursday, 8/22/2013 10:07
Or it was. But gold grades are fading fast as new reserves get harder to find...

In the GOLD MINING business, it is said that grade is king, writes Andrey Dashkov, research analyst with Casey Research.

A high-grade project attracts attention and money. High-grade drill intercepts can send an exploration company's stock price higher by an order of magnitude. As a gold project moves to the development stage, the higher the grade, the more robust the projected economics of a project. And for a mine in production, the higher the grade, the more technical sins and price fluctuations it can survive.

It is also said that the "low-hanging fruit" of high-grade deposits has all been picked, forcing miners to put lower-grade material into production.

You could call it Peak Gold – and argue that the peak is already behind us. Let's test that claim and give it some context.

One of the ways to look at grades is to compare today's highest-grade gold mines to those from the past. We pulled grade data from the world's ten highest-grade gold mines for the following chart.



As of last year, grades at the richest mines have fallen an average of 20% since 1998. However, except for 2003, when the numbers were influenced by the Natividad gold/silver project (average grade 317.6 g/t Au) and Jerritt Canyon (245.2 g/t Au), the fourteen-year trend is relatively stable and not so steeply declining. The spike in 2003 looks more like an outlier than Peak Gold.

https://www.bullionvault.com/gold-news/gold-grades-082120135