Uganda on Wednesday said recent exploration surveys have shown it has gold ore deposits of about 31 million tonnes and it wants to attract big investors to develop the sector hitherto dominated by small wildcat miners.
Over the last two years aerial exploration was done across the country followed by geophysical and geochemical surveys and analyses, Solomon Muyita, spokesperson for the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, told Reuters.
Muyita said an estimated 320,158 tonnes of refined gold could be extracted from the 31 million tonnes of ore.
Firstly, the level of exploration they’ve done doesn’t prove anything of the sort. Aerial exploration just doesn’t prove to that sort of level of detail.
About 244,000 metric tons of gold has been discovered to date (187,000 metric tons historically produced plus current underground reserves of 57,000 metric tons).
So, you know, no.
What they’ve done – after that exploration and proof error – is get the units wrong. If 31 million tonnes of ore produces 310k tonnes of gold (to keep the numbers simple) then that’s 10kg of gold per tonne ore. Good gold ore these days is under 10 grammes per tonne ore.
320k kg, maybe and perhaps, though that would be damn rich even then. 320 tonnes.
Politicians and numbers, eh?
Original spotter Jeff Katz.
So, a con job? Why did western native americans thrive for millennia, leaving the gold in the hills and the air as fresh, the food as plentiful, the trees as old as when they found them?
Those western native Americans managed to kill off most of the larger wildlife, completely change the forest ecosystems and eat each other when times got rough.
+10000 Mohave Greenie.
When did times get rough? Maybe you’re telling just-so stories that make sense given your priors, so who needs sources, eh?
So the Uganda government doesn’t like the wildcat miners selling the loot to the smugglers. It wants its taxes.
But of course the cost of snagging a wildcat, let alone robbing—–oops taxing him is more than it’s worth.
The big investors, with lots of bribes up front and huge expenditures held hostage to the government, are much more lucrative victims.
Maybe you’re telling just-so stories that make sense given your priors, so who needs sources, eh?
Well the native Amerinds definitely killed all the big animals and definitely did for lots of the forest. So I presume you are getting uppity because of claims of cannibalism.
But ritualised torture, human sacrifice and cannibalism were commonplace in all of America before the White man set foot. The Aztecs we all know about, although they were much more gruesome than most people realise.
When even Wikipedia accepts it, we can be pretty certain that it was a real thing. It is actually pretty hard to read any in depth books about their culture without coming across it.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2019/11/01/largest-child-sacrifice-graveyard-strikes-huge-blow-to-native-american-innocence-myth-n70100
I remember an HSBC research paper from the early 00’s which stated that all the gold ever mined would fit a double-decker bus.
So if these guys dig up 30 odd million tons of ore, what do they do with it after they have their 1/3oz of gold per ton. Build the twin peaks of Kilimanjaro ?
Nice story but not quite right. The usual comparison is into a bloc which could be fitted underneath the Eiffel Tower – don’t know why that but there we are.
Ah, I’ve just remembered the snippet in Hitchhikers Guide about the magician who said that he could make a mountain disappear. The next morning the inhabitants woke up to find a new moon in orbit around their planet.
Re the size of the world’s gold stocks…
I remember hearing a suggestion made some 30+ years ago, to whit “All of presently-living humanity could be fitted into a cube of one-mile sides, all of the world’s gold could be compressed into a sphere 60 feet in diameter, so the best thing to do then would be to tie the sphere to the cube, drop it into the deepest bit of the Pacific Ocean, and start again!”. 🙂
It all seems ok to me. All I have to do is send my bank details to the Ugandan government, so they can deposit the returns on my investments. As soon as I receive that ÂŁ4 million pounds promised by that Ugandan Admiral, as my share of helping him get his ÂŁ20 million out of the country, I’ll be buying shares in this.
@ Chester Draws
Is Peru in the west of North America now?
Eiffel tower? Blasted continental units. The double decker bus is a much easier unit of volume to use.
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