How Gold is Mined: The lifecycle

People in hard hats working underground is what often comes to mind when thinking about gold mining. Yet mining the ore is just one stage in a long and complex process. Long before any gold can be extracted, significant exploration and development needs to take place, both to determine, as accurately as possible, the size of the deposit as well as how to extract and process the ore efficiently, safely and responsibly. On average, it takes between 10-20 years before a mine is even ready to produce material that can be refined