Anyone have a "true"clue to how most silver is mined today? I read an article, that most silver is brought up as a by-product of other mining ventures. Can any confirm this? Also, any idea on the number of pure silver mines around the world? Maybe some numbers?
That's a great link Cloudsweeper. Thanks! I guess what i heard was right. It appears many companys indeed mine other products with silver being a by-product. I would have never of guessed that Peru was the leader in silver mining.
Silver really is all about supply and demand -- not economic collapse. There has definitely been a slow rise in production, and the world wide recession has definitely held back demand recently. The price is up anyway. If the world economy recovers, or if investment demand continues to rise, or if production increases top-out as they must at some point, the silver price will really explode upward. But the numbers make it look to me like investment demand is driving the price despite all of the [true] stories about the wonderful industrial applications.
In Arizona, only 20% of silver has come from silver mines. The other 80% is a by-product of copper mining. Veins of silver also appear in other mining operations. And now to drive everyone crazy... there's gold in your back yard! But only traces. Darn!
Let see... If I go to Home depot and buy a backhoe. Dig-up the yard 10ft down by 1 acre. And sift,sift,sift... Maybe, i can get 1 oz! :too-cool-for:
Wasn't there a sci-fi story about someone who had found a way to do that (uneconomically) and tricked another billionaire into buying it off of him?
Howdy, One of my favorite books growing up was called Instant Gold. SciFi about these folks that figured out the alchemy of gold and were selling a can of powder to which you added sea water and it turned into gold. The silver market is so terribly mixed, that it's hard to follow. There is the industrial demand side which follows the overall economy. There is the 'poor man's gold' side which follows gold. Occasionally, they'll be pulling together and at times apart. The supply side is relatively fixed. Sure there are more discoveries being made but like oil and the other natural resources, they're smaller and more expensive to develop. The days of the comstock lode and the big bonanza have gone the way of Jeb having oil bubbling up in his back yard. In addition, it takes years to bring additional supply on line - you've got to explore, discover, assay, permit, build the p&e, mine, refine and market. feh. peace, rono
It's rare to find a mine that only has silver - silver is usually associated with lead, zinc, gold, copper and in some cases uranium. Likewise with other precious metal mines, it's extremely dangerous for any mining giants to only look for such these days because precious metal prices fluctuate too much. Usually you look for a massive load of base metals and additional precious metals are added bonus. Some mines only achive less than 0.8g of precious metals per ton of rock or even lower for platinum group metals but they are still profitable because they mine other metals as well.
