Russian technologies that can bring down the gold market

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Thanks to the new technology of gold mining, its cost will be 30-40% cheaper. This could destroy foreign competitors and allow Russia to become the world's top gold supplier.

Russian scientists have learned how to get gold cheaper and faster. According to the most conservative estimates, the cost of Russian gold will be 30-40 percent cheaper, which will simply destroy foreign competitors and allow Russia to become the main supplier of gold on the world stage.

Now on the stock exchange the cost of one ounce (31, 1 gram) is almost 1300 dollars. Russian gold, experts calculated, will cost $ 480.

The technology was developed by our scientists from the National Research Technological University MISIS and experts from the mining company Zijin Mining Group (China) (engaged in the exploration and production of gold, copper and zinc). The method concerns the processing of gold-cuprous ores.

Today, miners are using direct cyanidation to recover gold from oxidized copper-bearing ores. This takes 100 to 120 hours and copper interferes with gold recovery. As a result, the final raw material is scarce, and its cost remains very high - up to $ 800 per ounce. The new method consists in the fact that gold is extracted through ammonia-cyanide leaching, which speeds up the process by 4-8 times, harms less precious raw materials and reduces the consumption of reagents.

There are other, more efficient methods, the use of which makes it possible to extract up to 99 percent of the gold from the ore, but this is too costly and impractical even at the current high prices for precious metals. Due to ammonia cyanidation, the recovery rate is also high - 85-90 percent. This is almost comparable to the results shown by Russian gold mining companies - just over 86 percent. Over the past three years, the ratio has grown by 0.8-1 percent, and the average cost of production per ounce according to the parameter all-in sustaining cash cost (AISC, cost including capital investments in existing assets) was about $ 560.

The new method was tested at the Taror gold deposit in Tajikistan, where a lot of copper is found in the bowels of the earth along with gold. They tried to separate the metals in the laboratories of Malaysia, Great Britain and Australia, but only Russian development turned out to be economically effective.

Ammonia cyanidation can be used in all deposits of the Russian Federation, and the technology itself is suitable for obtaining gold from electronic scrap and computer equipment.

Gold continues to rise in price, no matter what. But most likely, Russian know-how will bring down the market and prices will fall.

Andrey Egorov