Absolute change needed to mine Wits basin’s stranded 1.1bn gold ounces

South Africa’s Witwatersrand basin contains another 1.3-billion ounces of gold, almost as much gold as has been mined there since 1886 – but miners can only get to another 200-million ounces of it using today’s mining methods. If the industry does not come up with a new way of mining, more than a trillion dollars worth of gold will not be mined, because the 1.1-billion ounces in question are either below the cutoff for the current mining method, or they are at depths where there are no technical solutions to get to mine those ounces. Moreover, safety has reached a plateau and unless significant change is made to what creates this plateau, death and injury in mines will continue, which is totally unacceptable.