Posted on 11/23/2010 8:00:09 AM PST by DeaconBenjamin
California is being left behind by the new Gold Rush.
Despite sky-high prices and the state's rich gold legacy, the industry here is mostly dormant. California trails the leading gold-producing state, Nevada, by a wide margin.
A California revival is hardly imminent. Companies trying to reopen old mines in Grass Valley and near Sutter Creek have slogged through years of red tape, and there are no guarantees of success. The Sutter Creek plan is at least a year away, while Grass Valley is several years from reopening.
Standing in the way: scarcity of capital and strict environmental standards.
* * *
The allure of gold at more than $1,300 an ounce could bring about more mining. Sutter Gold Mining Inc., which wants to reopen a mine that runs alongside Highway 49 near Sutter Creek, has said it's sitting on at least 223,000 ounces and maybe as many as 680,000 ounces.
At today's prices, that's a bounty of $300 million to $900 million. Company executives say the price boom isn't a fluke.
The question is whether California can cash in.
* * *
The ban ended after the war, but the price was fixed by the U.S. government at $35 an ounce, and mining waned. The price was allowed to float starting in 1971, but by then several key California mines had closed.
Reopening them has proved difficult.
In the Mother Lode, many mine shafts have filled up with water, adding to the environmental issues. And the partial urbanization of the region creates local opposition.
John Parrish, the state geologist, said it can take seven to 10 years to assemble the needed permits for mining in California.
Emgold Mining has been working on the Grass Valley proposal since 2003. And still the hurdles are considerable.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
That's saying a lot considering that the mining industry doubles the total gold ever mined every 47 years.
10 years of permitting. Ridiculous. Money is stuck in the ground, the state is in financial trouble, and the lawmakers and regulators make it hard and expensive to dig it up.
Have Mine,
Will Trammel
Fire up the monitors...there’s gold in them thar hills!
We need a bounty on environazis.
Pray for America
So, in spite of the fact a new gold rush could employ thousands across the state and help to close the budget gap, Jerry will look the other way.
It's not just Califlowers
In Alaska, mining is a job producer. IF the co is allowed to open the mine.
Take the Pebble Mine project - Located on American soil in southwest Alaska, the Pebble deposit is remarkable for both its size and composition. Current resource estimate includes 5.94 billion tonnes in the measured and indicated category containing 55 billion lb copper, 66.9 million oz gold and 3.3 billion lb molybdenum; and 4.84 billion tonnes in the inferred category, containing 25.6 billion lb copper, 40.4 million oz gold and 2.3 billion lb molybdenum. Quantities of silver, palladium and rhenium also occur in the deposit.
And I doubt it will ever open, or at least not in my childrens time.
Of course the legacy of mining efforts in the past haven't helped....
Run the search string "Alaska mine waste" - the first several hundred are enviro sites calling for the shutdown or non-permitting of mines in Alaska.
Some here call it Lawfare.....
A buddy of mine liked buying the dust at the market rate when the miners came peddling it. He had it assayed once and found it was really only about 90% gold with 10% contaminants --mostly platinum and iridium!
Sounds like being a buyer might be a good business. Get a smelter and a buyer for your gold and off you go.
Anybody with a speck of intelligence and familiar with the economics of the "Gold Country" knows that the regions suffers from "arrested development!"
The only "growth industry" we have is local and state governments!!!
The private sector has been anxious for decades due to the "strict environmental regulation" that are constantly orchestrated to stop nearly all real estate improvements and even "any disturbance of the soil!"
Our county master plan states in it's intro that "development" is defined as: "any disturbance of the soil" and that includes mining. The Sierra Flub's old motto used to be "mining free in '93!"
“The Sierra Flub’s old motto used to be “mining free in ‘93!””
Way before that it was “eliminate all humans west of the Rockies”!
I had simply thousands of reasons to flee CA back in 2004 and I’ll be blessed but they keep coming up with new ones. It is stupid to a criminal extent to do something like this to what could potentially help them continue the rest of their criminal enterprise. One figures that this is all them just relying on the expectation that we’ll bend over and fork over.
Please, please, reps and sens, don’t fall for it. Let California slide into the sea, if that’s what they want!
There’s no such thing as a natural resource. It doesn’t become a resource until someone is willing to take the risk and make it so.
The state raises the risk beyond the return: Harming everyone, including itself, in the process.
You should head up that river and find the mother-lode.
The state currently has a moratorium on suction dredge mining until it completes its full EIS in connection with new regualations to further protect salmon and lamprey eel. In the meantime, the Klamath TMDL halts all dredging within several hundred feet of the mouths of rivers. (Conveniently where most gold occurs.)
We do have an old mines opening up using a special environmentally sound gold recovery process.
A lot of our mines are in trouble because the state process only considers mines to be active when they are selling product. Most follow the market and can remain dormant for several years. The state permitting process is considering those mones abandoned and forcing them to pay exhorbitant fees to reopen.
lol! Big corp mining is really pushing that one here too —and I’m hard pressed to decide who has crazier environmentalists, Panama or California!
You’re kidding me, right? I thought that outside of the US and Europe Greens are in open season.
Don’t they have life expectancies measured in seconds?
That may have been true a few decades ago when most of the world was dictatorships, but now with most of the world in democracies the greens and populists are all over. Every time there’s some big international conference in Rio, Kyoto, or New Delhi the anti-trade greens pour out the woodwork.
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