Gabriel Lafitte
By weight, the gold in Tibetan mining sites is small. What drives investment and extraction is the copper, essential to every “clean, green” technology you can think of. Yet, given the price of gold, the weight of the extractable gold, delivered in the same smelting process that pours off molten copper, is not the point. The quantum of gold may be small, but not its value. In 2025 China is hungrier than ever for gold, as an abiding holder of accumulated wealth, in a time when even the biggest Chinese real estate builders, tech entrepreneurs, exam coaching, and other industries, can go broke in a blink.
The focus is on the copper, and on the hydro dams that power its extraction from remote Tibetan mountain sides, and the copper cables that transmit electricity from Tibetan rivers to far distant Chinese industrial hubs.
Yet, in Tibet, these deposits are consistently polymetallic, usually bearing not only copper but extractable and profitable molybdenum, silver and gold. It’s a package, while the other elements buried in the earth are all classified as waste, to be dumped in a tailings dam.
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