‘Supergiant’ Gold Deposits Could Be Worth Over 80 Billion US Dollars

Two large gold deposits discovered in China may hold a collective mass of more than 2,000 metric tons (2,200 US tons) of the precious material – the largest ever found within the country’s borders.

If confirmed by further geological surveys, the Wangu deposit in Hunan province and the Dadonggou deposit in Liaoning province could be worth billions, with the Wangu deposit alone valued at more than 600 billion yuan (US$83 billion).

These estimates come with significant caveats – something about not counting the golden eggs before the goose has laid them – not the least of which is that Wangu’s assessment assumes that the entire resource can be extracted and that current gold prices will hold, conditions rarely achieved in real-world mining.

Related: It Literally Takes Fire And Brimstone To Transport Gold To The Surface Of The Earth

Watch the video below for a summary:

The Wangu deposit was reported by Xinhua, China’s official state news agency, in late 2024 as a ‘supergiant’ find with the potential to dramatically expand China’s gold resources.

“Many rock cores drilled showed visible gold,” bureau prospector Chen Rulin said at the time of the find.

The report stated that the deposit contained 300 tonnes of gold reserves – ie gold that has been assessed and quantified – to a depth of 2,000 meters (1.2 miles), with an estimate of over 1,000 tonnes down to 3,000 metres.

To date, no paper or scientific report has been published on the Wangu deposit, but it is possible that the exploration report is still being prepared.

The Dadonggou deposit may be even more impressive.

According to China’s State Council Information Office, subsequent government briefings suggested a potential resource approaching 1,500 tonnes – higher than the more than 1,000 tonnes estimated in a report published in China Mining Magazine earlier this year.

The discovery was made by the Fifth Geological Brigade of Liaoning, which surveyed the region, and found that traces of gold there rejected as economically unviable in the eighties actually belong to one large and continuous mineral belt, some 3,000 meters long and 1,500 meters wide.

Every borehole the prospectors drilled contained gold, the paper says. It is of a relatively low grade of 0.3 to 1 part per million – so the amount of gold per ton of material is quite low – but researchers say it is easily mined, with a potential gold recovery rate of 65 to 91 percent.

The interesting part here may be the type of Deposit Repress from Dadongong.

It appears near the Tan-Lu Fault, a major tectonic boundary fault zone with large horizontal shear fractures, along which minerals such as gold and pyrite were deposited over time.

The features differ from anything else in that region, and suggest that we may overlook similar gold deposits simply because the geology did not look as expected for a significant gold deposit.

Therefore, while it is true that there seems to be a large amount of gold in the Dadonggou deposit, its greater value may serve as a signal for the identification of others like it – if the grade holds and the extraction is as productive as the initial investigation predicts.

Gold, for all its wonderful uses, is not very abundant in the upper layers of the Earth. For every ton of shell material, there is estimated only 0.004 grams of the precious metal. However, somehow, there are regions in which there is an abundant “bonanza”.

In 2021, researchers in Canada proposed that rich gold deposits may be more common than we thought, and may have occurred in several other contexts than previous estimates had allowed.

Humans have valued gold for thousands of years, using it in unique tools, art, jewelry, and burials. But the precious heavy metal continues to surprise us with new discoveries.

Related: Scientists Testify Lead Literally Turns to Gold at Large Hadron Collider

In 2024, researchers in Sweden created goldene, a type of gold with one atom thick, two-dimensional, with properties not seen in its regular form.

Also last year, Australian scientists proposed that earthquakes could help forge large gold nuggets deep underground, while in England, a metal detector discovered what could be the country’s largest nugget ever.

Researchers continue to develop potential medical uses for nanoparticles of this valuable and finite resource as well: from combating antimicrobial resistance to preserving vision and treating Parkinson’s symptoms.

One study even suggests that gold nanoparticles can improve the taste of our wine.

How many precious mineral bonanzas remain to be discovered around the world is unclear. The evidence is starting to suggest that we may have reached a gold peak in 2018.

Until more data emerges, the recently reported scales remain provisional, with more detailed reports no doubt in the works.

Other large deposits, such as Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell in Canada, with approximately 4,790 tons, and Pebble in the United States, with approximately 3,310 tons of gold, may still leave them in the dust.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

Research on the Dadonggou deposit is published in China Mining Magazine.