Mineral Deposits & Market Values

In the connections of selling and leasing gold finds, the word prospecting has been defined as the action of searching for mineral deposits, the word exploration has been defined as the grade and tonnage of a new deposit that has been found, and development has been defined as preparation of a deposit for mining. When getting a prospect for sale or for lease, the prospector is for the most part preoccupied with exploration. A mineral deposit might be looked at as a commodity that can be put into the market. Because of this it has a value in the market that will depend on the reserves of ore, the established unit value of the commodity, as well as the grade of the deposit. If the exploration adds to the prospects of tonnage and grade, it will also raise the market value. Gold is one of the minerals that can often times be advantageously developed and mined by individuals or by a group or association of individuals, and does not need a lot of or very little treatment to get a product that can be put in the market. Given that a great number of these deposits have already been discovered and worked on, the occurrences of this are not very common these days anymore. If there is a prospector that has a property that continues to be rejected due to a number of issues and concerns, it is probably because there does not seem to be enough reserves to justify the capital investment that would need to be put into the deposit for production. In this case the owner will need to either do more speculative exploration to be able to increase the reserves that are known of or mine it himself. For the most part the bigger companies are simply not concerned about reserves that go under what they believe to be a minimum figure without concerning themselves about the grade in the deposit. If the exploration that is going on does not go along with the reserves in amounts that have been previously dictated by the company policy, there if there is not any geologic evidence that more exploration will improve the point of view of the reserves, most likely the examining engineer will turn down the property even when the grade remains to be very good. If the analysis of the engineer is accurate, the prospector has the choice of mining the property on his own on a small scale.