Mine Production
This website explores the contemporary global precious metals mining industry. The production numbers and the associated narrative are built from the bottom-up and tested against respected publicly available data sources. All figures are in troy ounces unless otherwise stated. The results are shown in greater detail than can be found anywhere else and are freely available to download.
A key objective is to provide a curated path through the data for specific audiences to get to the information they require.
Precious Metals Mine Production
Gold and silver can be found just about everywhere on earth, but not always on a commercial basis. The focus here is on precious metals, but this site might have been called “monetary metals”, as base metals and PGM (Platinum Group Metals) mine production is only included insofar as they include precious metals production as a by-product.
This approach describes gold and silver production, and the associated pipeline of projects, using three elements:
- the geography, puts names and places to the relevant countries and regions,
- the ownership identifies who owns the mining infrastructure, and
- the infrastructure, describes the mines and projects
The reports generated provided by the combination of these three elements, which are defined here, are compared against:
- global peak body/globally accepted reporting, to validate its coherence and consistency, and
- independent feedback and posted commentary to identify and resolve any errors. Register here.
By using multiple cross referenced data sources the “picture resolution” (in both detail and accuracy) is available at both a global and a local level.
Gold Production
The map below shows, on a graded scale, which countries mine the most gold – the darker the colour the larger the amount. Russia, China and Australia are the top three producers by a clear margin.
The table below provides gold production numbers for the map above. The table can easily be downloaded.
To give a relative scale, the production of the top gold producing countries (over 100,000 ounces per year) is shown in the following chart.
Silver Production
The map below shows, on a similar graded scale, where silver is mined around the world. Mexico is, by far, the leading producer, with China and Peru the next two largest producers.
The table below provides the silver production figures for 2023 and is the legend for the chart above.
The relative scale of production of the top silver producing countries (over 1 million ounces per year) is shown in the following chart.
Wiki and Data Aggregation
This site, therefore, can also be used in a number of ways, primarily as:
- A portal into the precious metals mining production numbers – the “wiki” of precious metals mining data
- An aggregater of gold and silver data to provide a window for entities looking to acquire, divest or simply understand global precious metals properties.