Certificate · Module 3 of 6

This is the first module with no equivalent anywhere in the free Foundation. If you have read all eight free lessons, this is where you hit new ground — and it is the module that makes the rest of the Certificate credible, because everything after it assumes you know where the metal came from and what a refiner's name on a bar is worth.

One idea runs through all of it: a number with a definition attached is worth ten without one.

Where the metal is

Gold arrives from orogenic and epithermal deposits, from porphyry copper-gold systems, from placers, and — historically more than anywhere else — from the Witwatersrand basin in South Africa. Platinum-group metals come overwhelmingly from two places: the Bushveld Complex in South Africa and Norilsk in Russia. That concentration is itself a supply risk.

Silver is the interesting case. Most silver is not mined by silver miners. It comes out of the ground as a by-product of lead-zinc and copper mining, which means silver supply responds to the economics of copper rather than to the price of silver. A silver price rise does not straightforwardly call forth more silver, and that asymmetry matters when you are reading a supply forecast.

Ore to doré

The physical path, in order: comminution — crushing and grinding — then gravity separation, then flotation, then cyanide leaching in one of its forms (CIL, CIP or heap leach), then recovery by Merrill-Crowe or electrowinning, then smelting into doré. Doré is not a product anybody buys: it is a semi-pure bar, typically gold and silver plus impurities, which goes to a refiner.

Reading a cost disclosure without being misled

Every cost figure a mining company publishes is real, published, audited — and comparable to nothing until you know its scope. There are two figures in general use and they are not the same kind of number.

Cash cost is the mine-site operating cost, reported under the Gold Institute Production Cost Standard, netting by-product credits and excluding sustaining capital, corporate overhead, reclamation and exploration.

All-In Sustaining Cost is the World Gold Council's voluntary industry guidance — first issued June 2013, current version 2018. Its stated objective is "to provide key stakeholders… with comparable metrics that reflect as close as possible the full cost of producing and selling an ounce of gold."

And then there are by-product credits, which are how a copper mine can report a negative cost per ounce of gold: revenue from the other metals is netted off. It is legitimate, and it is meaningless unless you know which metal is the primary product.

Resource is geology. Reserve is economics

Three reporting codes govern mineral disclosure — JORC in Australasia, NI 43-101 in Canada, SAMREC in South Africa — and all three use near-identical wording from the CRIRSCO template.

Mineral Resource: "A concentration or occurrence of solid material of economic interest in or on the Earth's crust in such form, grade (or quality), and quantity that there are reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction."

Ore/Mineral Reserve: "The economically mineable part of a Measured and/or Indicated Mineral Resource… defined by studies at Pre-Feasibility or Feasibility level… that include application of Modifying Factors."

In one line: a Resource is there and might one day pay. A Reserve has been shown by a study to be mineable at a profit. Inferred Resources can never convert directly to Reserves.

Which gives you the professionally correct first question when a press release announces a "resource" of four million ounces: which category, and has any of it been converted? The word is doing more work in that sentence than most readers notice.

Refining, and why 995 is not worse than 9999

Miller is fast and cheap. Wohlwill is slower and purer. That is not a quality ladder, it is a choice about what the bar is for. Different products, different buyers.

Artisanal mining, mercury and Minamata

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining is somewhere between 12–15% of world gold production (UNEP) and 20% (World Gold Council and the World Bank). Cite the range and name both sources. They use different definitions and averaging two numbers that measure different things produces a figure nobody published.

The employment picture is more lopsided than the production one. Artisanal and small-scale mining overall is "the primary source of employment for at least 44.75 million people across 80 countries" (World Bank/Delve, 2020); UNEP puts ASGM specifically at 10 to 15 million miners. The WGC states ASGM is about 80% of gold mining employment — and that qualifier matters, because the broader "80% of the global mining workforce" claim is repeated constantly in industry material and no primary source supports it.

The Minamata Convention on Mercury was adopted 10 October 2013 and entered into force 16 August 2017. Under Article 7, a Party that determines ASGM in its territory is "more than insignificant" must notify the Secretariat and develop a National Action Plan within three years. Annex C requires that plan to include steps to eliminate whole ore amalgamation, open burning of amalgam, burning of amalgam in residential areas, and cyanide leaching of mercury-laden material.

A practitioner has to hold two facts at once here: ASGM is a livelihood for ten to fifteen million people, and it is the largest anthropogenic source of mercury emissions. Romanticising it and condemning it are both failures of analysis. Mercury amalgamation persists because it is cheap, simple, needs no capital and works at one person's scale — which is why Annex C requires formalisation and public-health strategies alongside elimination.

The brand on the bar

Recycling supplied 1,404.3 t of a total 5,002.3 t of gold supply in 2025 — 28.1%, the highest since 2012. Remember from Module 1 that this is not new metal: it is stock changing hands.

Which brings us to why an unbranded bar is not a discounted version of a branded one. London Good Delivery accreditation for a gold refiner costs this:

LBMA, "How to apply for Good Delivery accreditation" and GDL Application Procedures. Read from the live fee table, 2 September 2026. Silver application totals £28,500; annual maintenance is £14,200 per metal or £21,300 for both. Fees are revised periodically.

Capital and scale can be bought. Time cannot. The brand stamped on a bar is a claim that somebody met a five-year, ten-tonne, fifteen-million-pound test — which is why an unbranded bar is a different product with a different buyer, not the same product at a discount.

And it explains the refining map. Switzerland mines essentially no gold. It refines it — converting 400 oz London Good Delivery bars into the kilobar format Asian retail markets actually buy.

What this module cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether any particular bar in front of you is what its stamp says. Good Delivery is a claim about a refiner, not a test of an object — and in a case you will read in Module 4, the serial numbers on four counterfeit bars were entirely legitimate.

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Educational content only. Not financial, investment or tax advice. Aurix does not buy, sell, store or broker metal, and does not quote executable prices.