'Are we not looking for it? Are we bad at finding it? Or have we found it all? My answer is we found it all'

A report by BMI Research states that global gold mine output growth will pick up in the next few years, supported by higher gold prices and solid projects in key countries.

“We forecast global gold production to increase from 105moz in 2018 to 125moz by 2026, averaging 2.3% annual growth. While a steady pace of growth, this represents a slight deceleration in growth rate compared with the previous eight-year average of 3.1%,” the firm says.

My good friend Pierre Lassonde, cofounder and chairman of Franco-Nevada, doesn’t know how we’ll replace the massive gold deposits of the past 130 years or so. Speaking with the German financial newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft this month, Pierre says we’re seeing a significant slowdown in the number of large deposits being discovered. Legendary goldfields such as South Africa’s Witwatersrand Basin, Nevada’s Carlin Trend and Australia’s Super Pit—all nearing the end of their lifecycles—could very well be a thing of the past.

Over the medium and long-term, this could lead to a supply-demand imbalance and ultimately put strong upward pressure on the price of gold.

“It doesn’t really matter what the gold price will do in the next few years,” Pierre says. “Production is coming off, and that means the upward pressure on the gold price could be very intense.”

On Tuesday, New York hedge fund Paulson & Co, founded by noted gold bull John Paulson launched a blistering attack on the world’s top gold mining companies over “serial value destruction” in the industry.

Speaking at the Denver Gold Forum, the sector’s most important gathering now in its 28th year, Paulson & Co partner Marcelo Kim called on major gold equity investors to join a coalition – dubbed the Shareholders Gold Council – to stop CEOs, boards and management enriching themselves at the expense of shareholders and prevent companies from embarking on the kind of acquisitions and budget blow-outs that according to Kim have destroyed $85 billion in value just since 2010.

The chart below shows the global cost curve for gold mining — in terms of all-in costs. That includes operating costs, sustaining capital at mines, and development costs to bring new ounces of production online.

From Canada’s Yukon to southern Patagonia, outbreaks of gold-rush fever are popping up as bullion markets stage a tentative recovery.

The number of holes drilled at gold deposits has been rising steadily for more than a year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. And while early-stage exploration budgets haven’t kept pace with spending at existing mines, prospecting hot spots are starting to pop up in traditional destinations Canada, Australia and Latin America.

Chemists from Russia working with their Chinese colleagues have come up with a new method for producing gold from ore, reducing extraction costs by upwards of 30-40%, and dramatically decreasing the amount of time needed to do so, the press service of Moscow's National University of Science and Technology (MISiS) has reported.

The Xiling mine in Shandong province told local authorities it had found 382.58 tons of gold reserves and that the volume could reach more than 550 tons once exploration is completed in two years, which would make it China’s largest mine, according to a statement Tuesday that cited the company on sdchina.com, a website supervised by the provincial government. Operating at full capacity, the mine would have a life of 40 years, according to the statement.

Chinese gold companies have been stepping up their search for domestic deposits and eyeing acquisitions as the nation seeks to increase reserves by 3,000 tons to as much as 14,000 tons by 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said last month.

The price of gold broke a three-year losing streak in 2016, but the focus of the world's top gold mining companies in terms of output continued to be on cost-cutting and divestment (with varying degrees of success) which led to a decline in production for most of the sector's majors.

Now, more than 40 years later, we're ready to start deep-sea mining for real. We're depleting many of our land-based stores of minerals, and remote though it is, the bottom of the ocean is a likelier source of precious minerals than asteroids. It is strewn with deposits rich in gold, copper, manganese, cobalt, and other resources that supply our electronics, green technology, and other vital tools like medical imaging machines.

In 2019, Canadian mining firm Nautilus Minerals will send robots to excavate deposits rich in copper and gold within the jurisdiction of Papua New Guinea. Other nations are hot on their heels. The International Seabed Authority, which regulates deep-sea mining in international waters, has granted contracts to more than 25 countries to explore for minerals.