Postal Gold Blog – Everything About Gold

Image by Wendy Harman

Up until now, around 150,000 tonnes of gold have been excavated from the earth.  It is estimated that we have 50,000 tonnes left available for mining.  However, it has also long been known that the world’s oceans contain about 6 million tonnes of gold dissolved in sea water.

Naturally, many entrepreneurs and scientists have tried to find ways to extract this gold, dreaming of fortunes untold.  One of the most notable of these was the German chemist Fritz Haber, who received a Nobel Prize in 1918 for developing a way to synthesise ammonia.  After the First World War, Germany was forced to pay an astronomical sum of money in reparations.  Haber decided to investigate the viability of extracting gold from sea water, hoping that it could be a way to help his country pay off these debts.

However, as Haber soon found out, one tonne of sea water contains only a minuscule amount of gold.  The amount varies in different locations, but it can be approximated that a litre of seawater contains 13 billionths of a gram of gold.  Extracting the gold from seawater would produce an amount of gold that would, if you were lucky, barely cover the costs of extracting it in the first place!  And this is provided that the method of extraction is 100% efficient, which is very difficult to ensure.  Haber decided after much experimentation and investigation that the extraction of gold from seawater was highly uneconomical.

However, Haber was not the last person to investigate this possibility.  Since his time, many others have tried to find ways to efficiently extract gold from the sea.  Methods proposed (and rejected) include everything from using mercury to form an amalgam with the gold, to introducing microbes that ‘breathe’ in gold and solidify it in their waste products.

Perhaps the future will see us with advanced technology that will make gold extraction a viable and economic option.  Until then, we will just have to stick with good old fashioned gold mines, as well as recycling old gold.  On that note – if you are looking for gold buyers to recycle your scrap gold, be sure to check out Postal Gold’s website.  Since we can’t yet make gold out of water, we might as well make sure that the gold that we already have stays in circulation!