How Much Gold Is In The World

How Much Gold Is In The United States

The U.S. owns the most gold in the world: 8,133.5 tonnes, more than twice that of the next two countries: Germany and Italy .

In 2018, U.S. gold mine production totaled about 210 tonnes, down 11 percent from 2017, according to the USGS. The estimated price tag of all that gold was $8.6 billion.

The USGS reports that about 18,000 tonnes of gold remain undiscovered in the U.S., with another 15,000 tonnes having been identified but not mined.

By far, Nevada reigns as the gold capital of the country. In 2018, mines in the Silver State produced 173.6 metric tons of gold, along with 249.2 metric tons of silver, according to the Nevada Mining Association.

How Much Gold Has Been Mined Already

Industry trade group The World Gold Council estimates that since that first gold bead was smelted, humans have mined roughly 190,000 metric tons of gold — roughly 77% of global recoverable reserves. And because gold is practically indestructible, most of that mined gold is still here today in the form of jewelry, gold coins, gold bullion , and electronics. .

Interestingly, most of this gold was only mined in the last half-century. Gold has been considered valuable and has been used as both jewelry and currency for most of recorded world history, which stretches back more than 7,000 years. And yet, the first 6,800-odd years of that history saw less than 20,000 metric tons of gold produced. It took the California Gold Rush, from 1848 to 1855, to push total global historical gold production past 20,000 metric tons. The next century, however, saw a tripling in cumulative gold production to 60,000 metric tons by the early 1940s, followed by a rapid 50% increase to 90,000 metric tons over the next three decades.

Indeed, about 50% of all the gold ever mined has been mined since 1967, and 80% of all gold ever brought above ground was mined since 1910, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

How Much Gold Has Been Mined

No one knows for certain how to calculate the total amount of gold ever mined, but the best guess is that around 190,040 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout history, reports the World Gold Council . Each year, mining operations extract about 2,500 to 3,000 tonnes of gold.

More than 40 percent of all of the gold mined around the world has come from the Witwatersrand Basin mine in South Africa. In 1970, the mine accounted for almost 80 percent of global gold production.

But after more than a century as the worlds top gold producer, the country has slipped. In 2006, the country put out 8.75 million ounces of gold. Compare that to 2016, when their gold production declined to a mere 4.5 million ounces, notes Business Insider, and about 4.2 million ounces in December 2018.

Since its almost impossible to destroy gold, however, most of the yellow metal thats been mined remains in some form. Gold is increasingly put to work in nanotechnology in medicine, space exploration, engineering, and environmental management where it is used in such small quantities that it may no longer be economical to recycle it.

Jewelry, for one, already accounts for 50 percent of current global gold demand, reports the WGC. How much gold does that leave for other applications? New and innovative uses for gold are being discovered every day, uses that could jeopardize your ability to buy gold in the future.

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How Much Silver Is There In The World

The following chart provided by GoldChartsRUs.com shows the amount of physical silver, which has been extracted from 1835 – 2016.

Silver is different from gold in the sense that it has many more industrial uses . Thus, the vast majority of all the physical silver we humans have ever mined has been exhausted through industrial applications, thrown out into landfills unrecovered.

Data on silver mining shows that, by 2018, just over 1,600,000 tonnes of physical silver had gotten mined all-time.

Again, in case you didn’t know, 1 ton is equal to 32,150.7 troy ounces.

Thus there have been just slightly more than 50 billion troy ounces of silver mined in history. Again, most physical silver mined over time has been lost to industrial use and gone unrecycled.

The following are identifiable above-ground silver bullion stocks presented in the 2018 World Silver Survey .

According to their data, there is now over 2.78 billion ounces of .999 fine silver bullion currently being held amongst silver vaults, silver ETFs or ETPs , government silver hoards, industrial silver stockpiles.

What this data doesn’t take into account is that private silver bullion coin and silver bar investment offtake and mainly record volumes of .999 silver bullion buying which has taken place since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

Most government silver bullion coin-producing programs began in the 1980s.

These are the countries that are estimated to have the most natural reserves of silver not yet mined:

Get Gold Now When The Time Is Right

At the rate that gold is being mined, the global stock of gold is decreasing. As the amount of gold above-ground being increasingly consumed, now is a better time than ever to invest in gold. As gold becomes more scarce, gold prices are certain to increase in the near future. You may be able to invest in gold now at a lower price than you will if you wait.To learn more about investing in gold for the security of your financial future, visit RME Gold. Our experts will walk you through everything you need to know about gold investments.

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Why The Amount Of Recoverable Gold Could Change Over Time

Part of the reason that peak oil didn’t happen earlier this decade, and part of the reason oil prices collapsed in 2014, is that the amount of oil in the world isn’t a hard and fast number at all. Rather, it fluctuates with technology, with humankind’s inventiveness at finding new ways to exploit the kinds of resources that it really wants, and with prices.

In the case of oil, fracking technology that was first pioneered in the 1940s was refined in the 21st century as a way to unlock previously unexploitable oil deposits. High prices were an incubator for efforts to commercialize fracking and other techniques such as horizontal drilling. When those techniques became commercially viable, it opened up several billions of barrels of oil that were previously deemed unextractable. Which has led to lower prices today.

Could something similar happen with gold? Perhaps.

Uk Firms Are Esg Leaders

UK companies have historically been early adopters of environmental, social, and governance practices. In fact, 45% of FTSE 100 companies have begun integrating ESG metrics into their executive compensation schemes.

UK firms are also leaders in gender diversity, consistently tracking ahead of other developed markets.

This outperformance even lasted through the COVID-19 pandemic, when dividend rates around the world were rebased .

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Reform: Bringing Rfs Mandates In Line With Reality

When congress passed the RFS in 2005, few, if any, could have predicted the state of energy markets today.

Key projections like increasing fuel consumption and decreasing domestic crude oil production failed to transpire. As a result, the RFS needs to undergo urgent reform in order to be better aligned with the realities of modern gasoline and diesel markets.

For more information, visit afpm.org

Among those 47 IPOs were a number of high profile tech companies including Moonpig , Darktrace , and Deliveroo .

The UKs venture capital scene is also thriving, with U.S.-based Sequoia opening its first European office in London. Sequoia was an early investor in world-class businesses such as Apple, Google, and Airbnb.

But Didnt The Spanish Get Lots And Lots Of Gold From The New World Especially From The Aztecs And Incas

In fact, the Spanish got much more silver than gold from the New World. In the 16th century, when production was in full swing, the Spanish only got 154 metric tons of gold, whereas they got 7440 metric tons of silver. Gold production in the new world for the entire the 16thcentury was thus less than half of what it was worldwide in 1900. Here is a comparison, decade by decade, of Spanish gold and silver production in the New World in the 16th century:

SOURCE:

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How Much Gold Really Is 165000 Metric Tons And 2500 Metric Tons

An Olympic swimming pool is 50 by 25 by 2 meters. It therefore contains 2,500 cubic meters of water. Each cubic meter of water is one metric ton. Gold is 19.3 times as dense as water. Therefore an Olympic swimming pool would contain 48,250 metric tons of gold. It follows that 3.42 Olympic-sized swimming pools could contain all the gold thats ever been mined. Another way to imagine this is to think of all the gold in the world ever mined as a single cube. That would be a cube with each side just over 20 meters, or 67 feet, in length. Given that about 2,500 metric tons of gold is mined each year, this annual production of gold would fit in a cube whose sides were 5 meters, or 16.6 feet, in length. All the production of gold in the world for a given year would thus fit in a 20 by 30 foot room with an 8 foot ceiling.

Where Did Gold Originally Come From

No one knew for certain, for all of our species history. Scientists have been trying to figure it out, ever since the alchemists of the Middle Ages failed to show that it was created through the transmutation of lead. But discerning the truth has been quite the ongoing detective story. In modern times, researchers had what they believed to be a very good theorythat gold appears as a result of nucleosynthesis during a supernova.

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How Much Gold Does The Us Have

According to , the United States has a gold reserve worth $373 billion. In June 2019, the U.S. Government Gold Reserve released a report stating it has:

• $10.9 billion worth of gold bullion
• $120.6 million worth of gold coins, blanks, miscellaneous

Altogether, the total for the U.S. Government Gold Reserve is more than $11 billion.

How Much Gold Is There Left To Mine In The World

Last month the price of gold hit a record high, pushing above $2,000 an ounce.

While this price rise was driven by gold traders, it begs the question about the supply of the precious metal, and when it will eventually run out.

Gold is in hot demand as an investment, a status symbol, and a key component in many electronic products.

But it’s also a finite resource, and there will eventually come a stage when there is none left to be mined.

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When Will The Gold Run Out

We are already seeing a decline in gold production as well as discoveries of gold veins. Still, we cannot be certain exactly when we will no longer be able to mine more gold. Some say we may run out of gold to mine by 2035, while others put that date closer to 2070. The end of gold mining will depend heavily on whether or not we find more deposits of gold. Another possibility that may push back the end is breakthroughs in technology that would allow us to safely and effectively extract gold from uncommon sources. That dream, however hopeful, is not likely to come true anytime soon.

The good news is that the end of gold mining will not be the end of gold. Gold, unlike other metals, is nearly indestructible. It does not rust, corrode, or break the same way other metals are known to. This is because gold does not oxidize. As a result, we can recycle the gold that we already have. That being said, we are increasingly using gold in ways that cannot be recycled. Gold in electronic devices, for example, cannot be recycled. Efforts are well underway to recycle the gold used in electronic devices. Unfortunately, these efforts have not yet provided any fruitful results. Its quite possible that none of the gold that has been thrown away in broken electronics may ever be recovered.

How Much Gold Is Needed For Mining To Be Viable

Gold is a valuable but relatively rare element, making up as little as 0.0011 parts per million — or grams per metric ton — of the Earth’s crust, and as little as 0.00001 grams per metric ton of seawater. Problem is, for gold mining to be economically viable using current technology, miners need to find gold deposits where gold is concentrated in greater density.

Barrick Gold’s reserves, for example, are rated at 1.5 grams per metric ton . Newmont Mining, on the other hand, gets by with just 1.14 grams per metric ton.)

Finding gold at such high densities isn’t easy.

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How Much Gold Is Left In The World

Figuring out how much gold remains to be mined is still tricky, though. We do know that gold makes up about four parts per billion of the earths crust. What we dont know, however, is precisely how much gold is still out there.

The WGC estimates that there are 54,000 tonnes of below-ground gold reserves waiting to be mined. These below-ground reserves account for less than 30 percent of what has already been mined.

World gold supplies are difficult to quantify. That is because gold reserves are not always reported accurately, according to the West Coast Placer gold blog. 50 percent of gold above ground is used for , which makes it difficult to track.

Furthermore, small-scale gold miners dont always correctly report their gold hauls, particularly in developing nations.

If there really are about 54,000 tonnes of gold waiting to be mined from underground reserves, were not talking about a lot of the metal. A cargo ship can haul about 25,000 tons of cargo, meaning that if you could gather all of the earths remaining gold in one place, you could haul it in fewer than three cargo ships.

Gold Production In The Universe

Gold is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis, and from the collision of neutron stars, and to have been present in the dust from which the Solar System formed.

Traditionally, gold in the universe is thought to have formed by the r-process in supernova nucleosynthesis, but more recently it has been suggested that gold and other elements heavier than iron may also be produced in quantity by the r-process in the collision of neutron stars. In both cases, satellite spectrometers at first only indirectly detected the resulting gold. However, in August 2017, the spectroscopic signatures of heavy elements, including gold, were observed by electromagnetic observatories in the GW170817 neutron star merger event, after gravitational wave detectors confirmed the event as a neutron star merger. Current astrophysical models suggest that this single neutron star merger event generated between 3 and 13 Earth masses of gold. This amount, along with estimations of the rate of occurrence of these neutron star merger events, suggests that such mergers may produce enough gold to account for most of the abundance of this element in the universe.

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Is It Time To Buy Gold

Iron rusts. Aluminum is flimsy. Lead and copper corrode. As far as natural elements go, gold is among the only ones that can stand the test of time. Thats one reason, among many, that gold has been used as a currency and a store of wealth since the beginning of recorded history.

The supply of gold cant last forever, especially given stressors in the mining industry. That means that there may come a time when youre not be able to buy gold as easily as you can now. Think about it. Has there ever been a wrong time to own gold?

How Much Gold Is There Left To Mine And What Happens If Gold Runs Out

To date, about 244,000 tons of gold have been discovered on earth about 187,000 tons have been produced and the underground reserves amount to about 57,000 tons.

Today, gold comes largely from only three countries, China, Australia, and South Africa. In 2016, the USA ranked fourth in gold production.

Fun fact: All the gold discovered so far would fit into a cube 28 meters wide on each side.

Most of the time, gold is used to make jewelry, investment gold products and is widely used in industrial sectors Gold is used in computers, communications equipment, jet aircraft engines and many other products.

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Gold Imported From Space

The going theory was that gold was imported via meteorite impacts during what is known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, billions of years ago. In 2011, that theory was confirmed by researchers from the Isotope Group of the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol in England.

These scientists analysed rocks from Greenland that are nearly four billion years old. Their conclusion, according to Dr. Matthias Willbold: most of the precious metals on which our economies and many key industrial processes are based have been added to our planet by lucky coincidence when the Earth was hit by about 20 billion billion tonnes of asteroidal material.

Lucky indeed.

The impacting meteorites were stirred into the Earth’s mantle by process of convection and deposited here and there. And voilà, humans had access to enough gold to foster the rise and fall of empires to make an entirely adequate supply of coins, rings, bracelets and bling for thousands of necks and eventually to help create smartphones, computers, GPS units and high-def television sets.

Now, we know that most gold is locked up in the planetary core, yet theres enough available for the purposes to which we put it. We seem to have all we need. But in total, how much is there, anyway?