Are the World-Leading Primary Silver Mines Exhausting?

Abstract

Silver is one of the rarest metals in nature and certainly among the most used ones, not only as precious good for financial investments but also for many industrial critical applications. Because it would be very difficult to analyze the situation regarding the future global availability of silver as a commodity in general, due to the necessity of a large amount of data which are hardly available, we have focused only on the mining production of primary silver. In particular, the study regards the activities of a sample consisting of twelve of the world top fifteen leading primary silver mines, which represent the 54% of the worldwide primary silver production and 16% of the global silver mining production. We have investigated the related exploitation state and trends of these twelve sites by elaborating their last ten-years statistics on silver production, ore grades, resources and reserves. The findings of this study, in short, are that the cumulative average silver ore grades, both in extracted mineral, resources and reserves, of the above selected mines, have decreased and also that the new mining fields (Dukat, San Bartolomé, Pirquitas, Saucito) have lower silver content indexes than the older ones.