<div id="readability-page-1"><div>“Statistics vary on this, but the average answer you’re given is that for every mining project there is, it has a 1 in 10,000 chance of going from exploration into production,” Andrew Thake, divisional director of Resourcing Tomorrow, told me over Zoom as I continued my deep exploration into the gold supply chain.Resourcing Tomorrow (rebranded in 2022 from its original moniker, Mines and Money) is where the global mining ecosystem comes to do business. 2,100 attendees converge in London each December, from junior explorers hoping to attract their first institutional check to mining ministers representing 42 nations, all orbiting the same question of how to get what is in the ground into the market. Thake has had a ringside seat to this industry’s transformation for more than two decades.“It takes 16.2 years for a mining company to get from exploration into becoming a producing mine. And there’s a whole number of reasons why it takes 16.2 years,” he continued. “One reason is permitting challenges. If you’re in the land, you’ve got to get permitting approval. How do you go and what’s your negotiation with the local community? Were they going to allow you to do it? If there is a dispute, how do you sort that out, the whole permitting process?”Mario La Sala, the former foreign policy advisor I introduced in my first article as inspiration for this gold series, has condensed this timeline. In the months I’ve spent following his progress at the Mira Confidence Mine in Zimbabwe’s Midlands Province, he’s closed an unsafe shaft, opened a new one, completed a geological study confirming $170 million in estimated reserves, and secured the blessing of the local chief along with a plan for community reinvestment.The distance between what La Sala has in the ground and what eventually lands in someone’s portfolio is far more intricate than the price ticker on your Bloomberg terminal suggests, involving refineries, government oversight, artisanal miners operating in the same geography, and a traceability challenge the industry hasn’t yet fully solved. I spent months interviewing via Zoom the people who live at every stage of it. Here’s where the supply chain begins.<h2>The Gold Supply Chain Starts Long Before Anyone Strikes Gold</h2>“Before you can set foot on the land, they give you what they call a reconnaissance license, which will allow you to go take a look,” William Ross, senior geologist at B-HiTech Geo Mining, told me. “Maybe take a couple samples, go visit the villagers — hey, is there gold? Yeah, we’ve seen gold over there, mining gold in the river, three miles away.”Ross has owned gold, diamond, and rare earth mineral mines across West Africa. B-HiTech Geo Mining is the consulting firm he co-founded with Guinean geologist Mamadou Diallo to spare the next generation of mine owners the education he paid for in hard lessons. Their MineLogX AI platform closes the loop on the technology side, aggregating mine-site sensor data, equipment performance, and environmental compliance metrics into a single auditable system.He walked me through the licensing progression required for every mine, beginning with the reconnaissance license, valid for 30 to 120 days. After that comes a research license, where a geologist systematically grids the land, tightening the sampling area until an ore body emerges. Only then does a miner apply for an exploitation license — either semi-industrial, allowing digs to roughly 30 feet, or full industrial, the 25-to-50-year commitments held by major mining operations like Caledonia Mining.Ross stressed the gold extracted at any of these stages isn’t pure. Its karat value is a function of geology, not the miner’s choices. “Your gold coming out of Guinea — our projects are 22.5 to 23-karat,” he said. “I went to Sierra Leone thinking I was buying 23-karat. It wound up being 20-karat.”La Sala ran his geological study before committing significant capital. Magnetics, induced polarization, resistivity, field sampling — the full program, completed in four months and self-financed. The Mira Confidence Mine’s ore came back at 22 karats with estimated reserves of $170 million to 50 meters depth.He then discovered the existing shaft was structurally dangerous and shut it down. A new one was operational within 20 days. “The geologist said, ‘Mr. La Sala, that shaft is very unsecure’,” he recounted. “I close the shaft, and I open a new one.” The decision cost him weeks of production delay but bought him a mine his workers could safely enter.Mark Learmonth, CEO and executive director of Caledonia Mining Corporation, put La Sala’s geology in context. The Mira Confidence Mine sits in the Archean basement complex within the Bulawayo group of lower greenstones, a formation with specific implications. “That typically means it will be relatively high grade, but very narrow veins,” Learmonth told me. “People excavating these tiny tunnels, because if the vein you’re chasing is relatively narrow, you don’t want to waste time and money digging a bigger tunnel than you actually need.”La Sala’s shaft currently processes 6 to 18 metric tons of ore per day — a proof-of-concept operation. The geological study identified a mineralized belt suited for open-cast excavation, where 50 to 100 tons per day becomes achievable. At the mine’s verified grade of two grams per ton, that produces roughly three to six kilos of gold monthly and somewhere between $300,000 and $600,000 at current prices, paid in U.S. dollars by Fidelity Gold Refinery the same day La Sala delivers.“Gold is an industry where the problem is not selling,” La Sala said. “The problem is production. I produce the gold. My mine is 25 kilometers from Fidelity’s office. I take my gold. They make the weight on the balance, and they give me the money. Your job is finished.”<h2>Where The Gold Supply Chain Gets Complicated</h2>“About 4% of annual production was coming from small-scale and artisanal mining twenty years ago,” Joseph Cavatoni, senior market strategist at the World Gold Council, told me. “Now the World Bank is estimating it could be as close as 20%.”La Sala’s licensed mine isn’t the only operation working Zimbabwe’s Midlands. Around any active gold region, there are informal gold seekers, often unlicensed, working by hand or light machinery and following veins formal operations haven’t yet claimed. The industry calls them artisanal and small-scale miners, or ASM, and their share of global gold production, as Cavatoni noted, has become impossible to ignore. When gold was trading at $400 an ounce, 4% was a footnote. At $4,000 and climbing, 20% of global production flowing through largely unregulated channels is a different conversation entirely.The concern isn’t artisanal miners themselves but those who’ve moved into the sector as the economics shifted. “This is the bad types of organizations using gold mining to facilitate illicit finance,” Cavatoni said — “whether it’s money laundering involved in drug trade or other nefarious activities, or helping the Wagner Group.”The regulatory pressure on ASM traces to a single piece of U.S. legislation. The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 required companies to identify and disclose conflict minerals in their supply chains, originally targeting tin, tungsten, and tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo, with gold added shortly after. The OECD then expanded the framework globally through its Due Diligence Guidance for metals from conflict-affected areas, classifying artisanal mining as a supply chain risk wherever it operated.“The reason why they wanted to distinguish between the two is because of regulations,” said Assheton Carter, CEO and founder of TDi Sustainability and The Impact Facility. “Artisanal mining’s a risk, because that’s associated with bad stuff.” The unintended consequence was an institutional wall between formal and informal mining — one that made compliance easier for large players while leaving smaller operators with fewer pathways into legitimate markets.The World Gold Council’s response is its Gold Bar Integrity Program, a tracking system using the Excedris database to trace 400-ounce refined bars through the institutional market. The technology’s reach, however, stops at the refinery gate. Provenance from the mine site remains the industry’s open problem.Carter has been working on that problem for 25 years. He built Walmart’s first traceable gold jewelry supply chain, helped write the Responsible Gold Mining Principles, and advises Cartier, Chopard, and Tiffany on responsible sourcing. He also invests directly into small-scale operations across Tanzania, Kenya, and Ghana. His argument is not that artisanal mining should be tolerated — it’s that the industry’s instinct to wall it off has solved the wrong problem.“You can have a responsible large-scale mine,” he told me. “Why can’t you have a responsible small-scale mine? Just because it’s small and uses different techniques doesn’t mean it can’t be responsible.” When he talks about artisanal miners, he’s talking about 40,000 people digging holes in the ground to feed their families.“Small-scale mines employ tens of thousands of people,” Carter said. “Fifty percent of small-scale miners are women.” Large-scale mines, by contrast, are increasingly automated. Clean supply chains and near-zero employment are not the same as responsible mining. “Big is a nice, clean hole — doesn’t employ anybody,” he said. “Small employs lots of people, but it’s a bit messy. So how do you bring all levels up?”The answer, in Carter’s work, is systems. In Honduras, he legalized a community of artisanal miners operating on the same river as a client’s formal operation, equipped them with machinery, certified their gold, and sold it to Cartier at a 12% premium for over a decade. “We treated them with dignity as people who are trying to make a living,” he said. “They’ve got gold underneath their feet. They need to know how to get it out and sell it, but they haven’t got the capital.”<h2>The Gold Supply Chain’s Margin-Thin Middle</h2>“All the money in mining is at the end — the jewelry — or at the beginning, the mining,” Carter said. “Refining’s actually a cost push. You don’t control the price of gold, nor do you control what you pay for it. You’re basically taking a percentage point on your way through.”What La Sala delivers to Fidelity Gold Refinery won’t look anything like the metal his investors are picturing. Doré is the intermediate product of on-site ore processing: crushed rock, separated and smelted into an impure alloy carrying the mineral signature of the ground it came from. Fidelity, Zimbabwe’s state-mandated in-country refiner, takes that doré and brings it to 99.9% purity. At that point, Learmonth said, “it’s gold as you would understand it.”Every miner in Zimbabwe must use Fidelity by law. “The government needs to be able to see how much gold is being produced,” Learmonth explained. “The gold mining industry’s got a very bad reputation of people stealing gold and exporting it illegally from the country. The government insists that all the gold goes through the in-country refiner so they’ve got a better ability to see what’s being produced in-country.” Zimbabwe taxes the refined output, captures the value-add of processing domestically, and closes the backdoor through which mineral wealth has historically drained from resource-producing nations.The refining business itself is a margin-thin operation. The value comes from what it unlocks downstream, with access to the institutional market, the commodity traders, the central banks, and the manufacturers who turn 99.9% bars into everything from sovereign coins to the circuits inside your phone.La Sala’s journey in the gold supply chain ends at Fidelity’s loading dock in Harare. But the ingots from the Mira Confidence Mine still have a long way to travel before they become objects of desire jewelry industry CMOs use to define the consumer’s pursuit of luxury. That journey continues in part three of this series</div></div>

SGDM

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GDXJ

The gold supply chain is complex, with a 1 in 10,000 chance of mining projects progressing from exploration to production, taking an average of 16.2 years. Key challenges include permitting and community negotiations. Mario La Sala's Mira Confidence Mine in Zimbabwe has confirmed $170 million in reserves, navigating local approvals and safety issues. The process begins with reconnaissance licenses, followed by research and exploitation licenses. The quality of gold varies by region, and La Sala's mine has 22-karat ore. The industry faces challenges in traceability and compliance, impacting the journey from extraction to market.

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Risk, Regulation, And $170 Million Reward Inside The Gold Supply Chain