Desert environments across the world have vast untapped riches waiting to be mined. Placer gold in desert environments have historically been overlooked due to the lack of water and harsh environments. With high gold prices and permitting becoming harder than ever, desert mining is becoming lucrative.
Mining is a heavily regulated industry often taking years to develop a mine. Mining in the desert offers significant advantages to the small or medium scale miner however. Placer mining doesn’t require use of chemicals like a majority of mines us. In addition, mining in desert is typically performed where there are no water sources for miles. Combined, these factors give significant headway in the mining permitting process. When setup properly, miners can leverage these factors to expedite permitting processes and reduce the amount of regulation they fall under jurisdiction of(i.e. get mining faster).
Mining Math
But dry washers don’t capture as much gold as wet plants? True, but a lifecycle analysis says otherwise. Wet plant typically yield 95% capturing efficiency. A conservative recovery yield on a drywasher is 70% (20-25% less than wet plants). The dry riffle tray portion of the plant, when setup properly under dry soil conditions, can easily yield 90% efficiency. The loss comes from not washing rocks. A 20 yard per hour wet plant will consume approximately 600 gallons of water per minute. Even when recirculating water, it’s simply not practical to truck water into a mine. The cost of this is high, and more importantly, when the plants not on, your’re not making money. The expense of trucking water, the costs of pumps and pumping water, and most importantly the time spent hauling water more than offsets the 20% difference in recovery yield between wet and dry plants. Process the dirt and metal detect the tailings for best recovery.
Desert Drywasher
Consider a placer gold deposit which contains 1/3 gram of gold per cubic yard of dirt.
Desert Drywasher 1.0 conservatively will process 12 tons of dirt per hour and can be operated by one 1 operator. Fuel expenses for heavy equipment will be approximately $100 per day.
Processing dirt for 8 hours each day. This yields 6 yards * (1/3 gram of gold for each yard) = 16 grams of gold or about half an ounce. With gold prices sustained above $4000 per ounce, this yields $2000 dollars gross income per day.
