RETHINKING GOLD: A CASE FOR LEAVING VALUABLE COMMODITIES IN THE GROUND

The global clean energy transition will require more metals than the world’s miners – industrial-scale and artisanal combined – can hope to supply.

It’s too late to turn back from addressing climate change. Only once we collectively accept that it will not be possible to extract billions of tons of critical minerals in time, can we begin to figure out how to build a clean energy future for real.

So what to do? The first step is to take a serious look at what the world needs to mine, and what it does not. Gold is a natural place to start. It has few practical uses: 50 percent of what we mine today becomes jewellery, with about 40 percent extracted and purified into bar form. Only about 10 percent is used for industry.

To get this, gold generates more waste per ounce than any other metal. Billions of gallons of waste have been released since cyanide heap leaching emerged late last century. The footprint will only grow as ore grades plummet.

All this for a metal we do not need to mine. There is enough gold in circulation today that we could stop targeted industrial gold mining and it would not affect the supply we need for its practical applications.

Gold is often found along with copper and other important metals, but it’s time to rethink the exploration and permitting of mines where gold is the only commodity extracted. Why do we accept the enormous costs of dedicated gold mines? That inertia driving gold extraction is truly immense: the gold market was worth over $214 billion in 2021 and growing, with record prices in recent years.

In my book Pitfall, I initially treated the idea of cancelling industrial gold mining as a thought experiment, until I learned that this is not a new idea. Barrick Gold briefly explored using blockchains as a digital ledger system to create reliable records of the measured gold reserves in the ground; investors could buy tokens representing a quantity of gold underground, which could be traded on a digital exchange. Barrick abandoned this project, but there are multiple companies attempting to make this very model happen.

We could stop mining for diamonds too, which are extracted at an immense environmental cost. Instead, high quality diamonds can now be created in a lab by placing carbon in a pressure chamber.

The idea of leaving valuable resources in the ground is a truly disruptive idea, and one that gets to the heart of determining what humanity collectively needs, versus what the market demands.