#KATE MINER FULL#

While this forecast is based on the assumption that inflation is brought under control within a couple of years, the company is taking steps to insulate itself from rising prices by, for example, installing solar panels for its mines’ energy needs. It expects its cost of extraction to fall from about $1,040 an ounce last year to about $950 by 2026. Gold mining has been slower to be automated than the extraction of other minerals found further below the surface but the company has introduced autonomous haulage at its Boddington mine in Australia and is in partnership with Caterpillar to create the industry’s first fully autonomous, electric, zero-carbon mining system. Newmont is also making its operations more efficient. Even under the most optimistic estimates of supply from potential new sources, global output falls by a third between now and 2029.

“Production from existing gold mines is forecast to halve in the next 10 years,” he says. While this is making mining more profitable, it does mean that fewer new sources of supply are being found. They have stricter financial criteria for going ahead with new projects,” de Uphaugh says. “Gold miners are now run by people with discipline, who are not gung ho but run their business in a systematised way. When that bubble burst a decade or so ago, those executives were fired and their replacements took a more hard-headed approach focused on profitability and cutting risk and debt. This, of course, came at the expense of profitability.” They sought to make their company the biggest by spending fortunes on seeking new sources or by buying rivals.

#KATE MINER FULL#

“Searching for new mines is the glamorous side of the business and the previous generation of mining executives, their heads no doubt full of images from cowboy films, did just that.

Mining companies have also lost their appetite for “prospecting” – searching for entirely new sources – and instead now concentrate on getting all the gold they can out of existing mines, de Uphaugh says. Whereas once it could be found on the surface, now ever deeper mines are required. “If you want to develop a new gold mine it’s not obvious where to go.”Īll the places where gold can be taken from the ground easily have long been exhausted. “The main reason is that gold is getting harder to find,” says de Uphaugh. This is the view of James de Uphaugh of Edinburgh investment trust, which has a stake in Newmont, the New York-listed gold miner. The extra demand will come from the central banks of certain countries around the world that have seen how Russia’s dollar holdings have been subject to sanctions and decide to invest instead in an asset that they can keep in their own vaults and has no “counterparty”. Simply put, supply is all but certain to fall and demand is likely to rise.

But even if investors remain lukewarm about its inflation-busting credentials there are good reasons to expect its price to rise in the coming years. Gold is, after all, the traditional safe haven in such times. One of the surprises of this sudden period of high inflation is that the gold price has not shot up. Questor share tip: this company has turned its back on the excesses of past commodity booms and is now a well run business 'I felt it was a great honour to be able to give voice to those different points of view.Gold has let us down so far but the price will rise soon – and so will this miner 'I felt like that was that's what inspired me to write this story and without being really sentimental, these divisions we began to try and explain and tell in this first episode and we unpick throughout the series, they do still exist, there are political divisions in these communities. “That's far braver than writing television dramas, so, I'm really grateful.”Įxplaining why he wanted to highlight such an important story, James added: 'As you would have already seen from the drama, these themes and issues about how the past speaks to the present and how we're identified or how we're defined sometimes by the conditions where we're born into or when something impossibly tragic happens to you and your family.

Kate miner