How Much Gold Is There In The World

Three Categories Of Gold

Gold undeniably has had a crucial role throughout human history. It enabled the first local and then global marketplaces and allowed humans to trade goods for a unit of exchange. There are generally three ways to look at gold.

First, gold has been used as a currency for trade. From the monetary viewpoint, gold has an inflation rate of ~1.5%, with 244,000 metric tons of gold discovered, of which 187,000 tons have been mined and 57,000 tons underground reserves. There is probably more gold underground that hasn’t been discovered yet or is uneconomical to mine at current gold prices.

Second, as a store of value or expression of wealth. Due to the inherent scarcity of gold, many people are drawn to it, and it represents their wealth with the amount of gold they possess.

Third, as an industrial commodity. Because gold does not react with other substances, it has excellent biocompatibility. Think about teeth filling, where dentists have been using gold to fill holes in teeth for thousands of years. To reduce reaction with skin or other body parts, gold is used to protect the body. Gold is also an excellent conductor, and engineers use it in many electric appliances.

So, humans need gold that’s why we have a huge mining industry responsible for delivering us new gold to cover our needs. When it comes to mining, you need to know two categories of underground gold.

How Much Mineable Gold Is Left

The World Gold Council estimates that remaining reserves worldwide amount to just 30% of what’s been mined already — 54,000 metric tons of gold in sufficient concentrations, and buried at sufficiently accessible depths, to be mined at reasonable cost.

At recent global production rates of roughly 3,100 metric tons per year, that means that in less than 20 years, all recoverable gold reserves worldwide should be depleted. .)

Two Miners You Could Consider For Your Portfolio

There are three categories of companies in the gold industry:

• Mining Companies – These are companies directly involved in mining and selling gold.

• Gold-focused ETFs: Funds that buy and own gold or shares of several promising gold mining companies.

• Gold streaming and royalty companies: These are companies that pay the fees required to mine for mining companies in exchange for:

• A percentage of the mine’s revenue

• A right to buy the produced metal in the future for a fixed price

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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.

Why Is Silver So Cheap

On the other hand, silver has more industrial use cases than all other precious metals today. That helps give it some more value, and also helps offset the imbalance between supply and demand. More silver to go around means that its price will be cheaper, untilt hat situation reverses all of a sudden.

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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 .

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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The Amount Of Minable Gold On Earth

What is of more concern is gold we can access in the here and now, depending solely on planet Earth. When estimating our global reserves, then, its probably best to be conservative. The U.S. Geological Survey has done just that. After reviewing all currently known in-ground resources, the USGS determined that there remain only about 52,000 tonnes of minable gold.

A mere 12 years worth, at present demand levels.

And if that suggests a supply crunch to you, youre right.

The only way producers can respond is to bring currently-unprofitable mines online or develop new mines atop very low-grade deposits. Perhaps that kicks the can down the road for a while. But the reality is still that at some point we run out of economically minable gold, and that point is going to arrive well before were working the moon.

The inescapable logical conclusion, looking just a few years out, is that higher gold prices are baked in the cake.

How Much Is All The Gold In International Reserves Worth

There are 33,248.5 tonnes of gold in the world, in international reserves . Today, at a rough 2017 price of USD 1,145.90, all the gold in the world is worth 1.25 trillion dollars. Again, that is at todays market price. If every country liquidated its reserves and actually tried to sell it, it is unlikely anywhere near this price would be reached.

How much is all the gold in the world worth? If you take the 165,000 tonnes estimate seriously, use a multiplier of 4.96262989308. That gives us USD 6.20 trillion, at least according to prices in January 2017.

The following graph shows the change in gold prices since 1970 .

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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:

Current Major Sources Of Gold

To understand exactly how much gold is in the world and when we may run out, a good first step is to look at current sources and production of gold.

The largest single source of gold in history has been the Witwatersrand Basin of South Africa. This geologic formation is believed to be the result of an ancient meteorite and has produced over 1.5 billion troy ounces of gold since it was discovered in 1886. Witwatersrand accounts for roughly 50 percent of the gold ever mined. The formation, however, has seen declining production since the 1970s. Recently, the total gold output of South Africa, almost all of which comes from Witwatersrand, has dropped below 170 tons per year.

Other major sources of gold include the extremely deep Mponeng mine in China, the Super Pit and Newmont Boddington mines in Australia, Indonesias Grasberg Mine, and the mines along the Carlin Unconformity in Nevada, USA. Canada, Russia, and Peru are also major producers of gold.

Between all of the gold sources in the world, current estimates suggest that roughly 2,500 to 3,000 tons of new gold is mined each year. At present, experts believe that the total amount of above ground gold in the world stands at just over 190,000 tons.

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When Might We Run Out Of Gold

In the U.S. and throughout the world, theres still gold in them thar hills, to borrow an expression associated with the U.S. Gold Rush of the mid-1800s. But theres really only a precious amount of the precious metal.

In 2015, investment bankers at Goldman Sachs speculated that the worlds mineable reserves of gold would run out by 2035. In fact, some experts believe the global supply of mineable gold will hit its peak in 2019 and trail off after that. Over the past three decades, the rate of gold mine discoveries around the world has tapered off.

Looking at the fourth quarter of 2018 alone, most gold miners reported declining production. The World Gold Council confirmed this fourth-quarter decline in their report Gold Demand Trends Full year and Q4 2018, noting that the final quarter of 2018 saw gold mine production fall back from the record quarterly total achieved in Q3.

Prominent mines that experienced a decline include Newmont Goldcorp, Barrick Gold Corporation, and Kinross Gold Corporation.

• Goldcorp, the worlds largest gold mining company by market cap, reported a YoY decline of 2.5 percent.
• Barrick Gold, arguably the second largest gold mining company in the world, reported a ~6 percent YoY decrease.
• Kinross Gold, which claims to be a senior gold mining company, reported a decline of 6.5 percent YoY.

Australia, Canada, and the U.S. account for about 40 percent of worldwide spending on gold mine exploration.

Where Are The Current Mines

Only a handful of countries produce the majority of the worlds gold. The largest supplier is in South Africa, specifically the Witwatersrand Basin mine. Nearly half of all above-ground gold has come from this one mine. Other major suppliers of gold include China, Australia, Indonesia, the US, Canada, Russia, and Peru. Despite this seemingly large number, the amount of gold pulled from mines has tapered off, and in some cases even declined, over the last several years.

Though a few new gold veins have been discovered in recent years, finding one is increasingly rare in the 21st century. There are two gold mines scheduled to open in Nevada: one in 2021 and the other sometime after 2025. Another mine in Canada began producing gold in late 2020. These mines are extracting some of the last veins of gold to which we have access.

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Given 165000 Metric Tons As An Upper Bound On Available Gold How Much Does That Leave To Each Human On The Planet

Humanity has just hit the 7 billion mark. That leaves just under 24 grams of gold to each person on planet earth, or .76 troy ounces or .83 ordinary ounces per person. In an ordinary male gold wedding band at 18-karat purity, there are about 5 grams of pure gold. That means every person on planet earth could own about 5 gold rings. At the current price of $1,750.00 per troy ounce of gold, that leaves $1,326.00 in gold for each person on planet earth. Gold production has increased by a factor of 2.1 from 1959 to 2010. At the same time, the world population has been multiplied by a factor 2.2. Thus we produced more or less the same amount of gold per inhabitant as in 1959. [QUOTE SOURCE: )

Where Is The Gold

Nearly half of the above-ground gold is in our rings, necklaces, bracelets, and other pieces of jewelry. However, gold becomes hard to track once it is used in jewelry, so our numbers on how much gold is in jewelry may be off. Approximately a fifth of the worlds gold is tied up in private investments. The rest is split between official holdings and miscellaneous projects. The majority of the gold in official holdings is underneath London. The miscellaneous group includes technological and scientific projects that use gold. As technology improves, we continue to find more fields in which gold is particularly useful, from space exploration to nanotechnology to environmental management. The malleability and longevity of gold lend themselves incredibly well to such projects. Yet it is in these fields where gold disappears. The amounts of gold used in scientific applications are so small that they cannot be retrieved or recycled. In other cases, the gold used in our everyday electronics is simply discarded with a device when we decide we are done with it.

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How Much Silver Bullion And Gold Bullion Is There In The World

2.5 billion oz of Gold Bullion and

4 billion oz of Silver Bullion in the world.

In fiat currency terms, both gold and silver bullion valuations are still magnificently dwarfed by total fiat currency supplies and other asset class valuations.

The following updated Exter Pyramid takes into account all the physical gold available above-ground .

At the current spot price of gold, there is about fully fiat valued USD 4.6 trillion in gold bullion in the world, while there is around another full fiat currency valued at USD 100 billion in silver bullion held by global investors and governments.

Respectively both these silver and gold bullion valuation sums are dwarfed by the total valuations for debts, real estate, fiat currencies, and derivatives worldwide.

Given current undervaluations of gold and silver bullion relative to other financial assets and real estate, now is likely a perfect time to be buying bullion as a long-term store of value .

If you are an investor and want to learn more about either silver or gold investment, we suggest starting with the following short videos and then possibly picking up our free SD Bullion Buying Guide, a great source for new gold investors.

How Much Gold Exists In The World

GoldSilver Team

The question of how much gold exists in the world is often asked and is an important one. Its not only of interest to the simply curious. Knowing how much gold we have is also critical to grasping the future dynamics of supply and demand and what the future price of gold might look like.

The correct answer, as it turns out, is a lot–and a little.

Thats a seeming contradiction. It isnt, really, but in order to understand what it means we have to go back to the beginning and ask another question:

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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?

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.

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