GoldPaq

Gold mining is a very profitable industry in the United States. Found in several areas of the U.S., gold continues to provide both important employment opportunities for U.S. residents and money to the areas where mines are located. No less important is the fact that gold is an extremely valuable export that contributes considerable amounts of money to the U.S. economy.

Several American states have estimable gold mining operations, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, South Dakota and Utah. Nevada is the largest producer of gold, accounting for over half of the gold mined in the United States, but Alaska, California, and Utah also produced significant amounts of gold.

There are three major types of gold mining active in the United States today: placer mining, hard rock mining, and by-product mining, all of which require entirely different methods of mining the ore, then extracting the gold that is contained within the ore. They all share the same goal - to make the most money when they sell gold

Placer mining is the type of gold mining that most people are familiar with. In placer mines, the seams of gold lie close enough to the earth that the gold can be found in the soil and in streams. Placer mining is associated with gold panning in streams and soil. While gold panning is the easiest way to mine for gold, and results in instant gratification when gold is found, it is time and labor intensive, and is obviously not feasible for productive mining on any scale. Panning is more useful for locating placer deposits, and for gold-panning hobbyists.

Dredging is another historical method of extracting gold from placer seams. In dredge mining, a machine is placed in a stream or other body of water known to hold placer deposits, and extracts the gold by suction. Dredging is not widely used, both due to it’s detrimental effect on the fish and other water wildlife, and because it is a less productive method of gold extraction; however, some large suction dredges are still used throughout the world.

Sluicing, a more highly-developed method of panning for gold, is sometimes used for commercial gold mining. In sluice mining, which is conducted in streams where placer gold is found, a sluice box is constructed to catch the gold as it flows through the stream. While this may seem only nominally more productive than gold panning, sluice mining is conducted on a large scale, with the sluice boxes spanning the width of large streams.

Few productive placer mines are left in the United States; as a result, most of the gold mines in the United States are hard rock mines.

In hard rock mines, the gold is encased in rock, deep in the ground. This rock and gold combination is known as gold ore. As with an other underground ore, there is no 100% safe or uncomplicated way to extract this ore from deep within the earth, making hard rock gold mining a difficult and dangerous process that is not without harm to the environment.

Although some of the hard rock gold mining in the United States is done through open pit mining, which involves opening up enormous areas of the earth to extract the gold ore found beneath, most of the hard rock gold mining in the U.S. is accomplished through underground mining, in which the gold is extracted by digging underground tunnels into the ore, taking the ore out as the tunnels are created. Both open pit and underground gold mining involve blasting out huge chunks of earth in order to get to the gold ore.

Gold does not come out of hard rock seams in nuggets or flakes, as it does in placer mining. The gold must be separated from the rock it is embedded in. This requires sophisticated, intricate processes.

In the United States, gold is most often extracted from ore using the cyanide extraction process. In this process, a solution of cyanide is mixed with the finely-ground rock that results from gold mining. The ground rock is then separated from the resulting gold cyanide and/or silver cyanide solution. Added to the gold cyanide solution is zinc, which extracts residual zinc along with the gold. Then, the zinc is removed using sulfuric acid, which results in a gold sludge that is smelted down into solid gold.

The cyanide extraction method has become safer over the years, but there are still dangers to both the environment and the people who work to extract the gold from the cyanide, making hard rock gold mining and extraction a risky, albeit profitable industry.

Gold is also mined in the United States as a by-product of other metals such as silver and copper, or as a by-product of minerals such as quartz. This is typically hard rock mining, as well. With the high price of gold it is a very valuable by-product.

Gold is one of the most profitable industries in the United States, so profitable, in fact, that it has allowed the United States to tie with Australia as the second-highest gold producer in the world, following Africa.

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