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Integra Gold Launches $1 Million Challenge to Find Next Gold Discovery

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Integra Gold Launches $1 Million Challenge to Find Next Gold Discovery

Integra Gold Launches $1 Million Challenge to Find Next Gold Discovery

Today Integra Gold launched the world’s largest crowdsourcing challenge related to mining to find the next large gold discovery.

The company recently acquired a treasure trove of data through its acquisition of the Sigma-Lamaque Mine and Milling Facility near its Lamaque South discovery. The six terabytes (6,000 GB) of data spans 75 years and originates from the exploration and production efforts of Teck, Placer Dome, and other companies that worked these historical properties.

The data includes over 30,000 historical drill holes, 500,000 gold assays, and hundreds of kilometres of underground workings.

Overall, both the Sigma and Lamaque mines produced 4.5 million oz of gold each. However, here lies the opportunity that Integra sees: the Sigma Mine was more than 700m shallower than the Lamaque Mine, despite producing the same amount of gold. Could there be more gold underneath?

If gold was discovered in this new contest, then it wouldn’t be the first time for Integra. Just to the south, they discovered a deposit in 2010 that has over 1 million oz (3 g/t cutoff) at a high-grade of 7.1 g/t Au (Indicated). This is part of the reason that they believe in the potential of the overall complex.

Integra hopes to attract the expertise of those in academia, geology, the mining sector and many other disciplines to interpret the data. The company is partnering with HeroX, a company co-founded by the legendary XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, to produce the competition.

“The Gold Rush Challenge follows in the incredibly successful footsteps of the Goldcorp Challenge and the Ansari XPRIZE competition,” says XPRIZE CEO and HeroX Co-founder, Peter H. Diamandis. “We live in a world of incredible cognitive surplus and your ability to tap into brilliance is now unparalleled. By utilizing the HeroX platform, Integra Gold is paving the way for significant innovation in the mining industry by encouraging collaboration and openness.”

For more about the contest, stay tuned to Integra Gold’s website.

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Uranium

Charted: Global Uranium Reserves, by Country

We visualize the distribution of the world’s uranium reserves by country, with 3 countries accounting for more than half of total reserves.

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A cropped chart visualizing the distribution of the global uranium reserves, by country.

Charted: Global Uranium Reserves, by Country

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

There can be a tendency to believe that uranium deposits are scarce from the critical role it plays in generating nuclear energy, along with all the costs and consequences related to the field.

But uranium is actually fairly plentiful: it’s more abundant than gold and silver, for example, and about as present as tin in the Earth’s crust.

We visualize the distribution of the world’s uranium resources by country, as of 2021. Figures come from the World Nuclear Association, last updated on August 2023.

Ranked: Uranium Reserves By Country (2021)

Australia, Kazakhstan, and Canada have the largest shares of available uranium resources—accounting for more than 50% of total global reserves.

But within these three, Australia is the clear standout, with more than 1.7 million tonnes of uranium discovered (28% of the world’s reserves) currently. Its Olympic Dam mine, located about 600 kilometers north of Adelaide, is the the largest single deposit of uranium in the world—and also, interestingly, the fourth largest copper deposit.

Despite this, Australia is only the fourth biggest uranium producer currently, and ranks fifth for all-time uranium production.

CountryShare of Global
Reserves
Uranium Reserves (Tonnes)
🇦🇺 Australia28%1.7M
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan13%815K
🇨🇦 Canada10%589K
🇷🇺 Russia8%481K
🇳🇦 Namibia8%470K
🇿🇦 South Africa5%321K
🇧🇷 Brazil5%311K
🇳🇪 Niger5%277K
🇨🇳 China4%224K
🇲🇳 Mongolia2%145K
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan2%131K
🇺🇦 Ukraine2%107K
🌍 Rest of World9%524K
Total100%6M

Figures are rounded.

Outside the top three, Russia and Namibia both have roughly the same amount of uranium reserves: about 8% each, which works out to roughly 470,000 tonnes.

South Africa, Brazil, and Niger all have 5% each of the world’s total deposits as well.

China completes the top 10, with a 3% share of uranium reserves, or about 224,000 tonnes.

A caveat to this is that current data is based on known uranium reserves that are capable of being mined economically. The total amount of the world’s uranium is not known exactly—and new deposits can be found all the time. In fact the world’s known uranium reserves increased by about 25% in the last decade alone, thanks to better technology that improves exploration efforts.

Meanwhile, not all uranium deposits are equal. For example, in the aforementioned Olympic Dam, uranium is recovered as a byproduct of copper mining occurring at the same site. In South Africa, it emerges as a byproduct during treatment of ores in the gold mining process. Orebodies with high concentrations of two substances can increase margins, as costs can be shared for two different products.

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