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NOAA claims there is 1 gram gold / 100 million metric tons of seawater[0]. Even if you could refine it, there has to be other valuable materials at significantl

NOAA claims there is 1 gram gold / 100 million metric tons of seawater[0]. Even if you could refine it, there has to be other valuable materials at significantly higher concentrations with a plausible profit margin. [0] https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html

tecleandor 3y ago
That's ten grams per cubic kilometer, and given the volume for the Atlantic Ocean I can see in Wikipedia [0], that'd be 3100 Metric Tons of gold, that is around the global yearly production of gold [1]. It's a big number, but yeah, probably there's something else more expensive. Like salt. At today's price, that's around $650 of gold per cubic km. A cubic km of Atlantic water, having a salt concentration of 3.3%, would have around 32 million metric tons of salt. At today's cheapest price of 8$ per ton of salt in brine (that I don't even know if it's correct, but i got it from here [2]), that'd be $240 million per cubic km. Way more profitable per cubic km of water (if you don't factor the cost of moving 32 million metric tons of anything :D ) 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Ocean 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_production 2: https://www.statista.com/statistics/916733/us-salt-prices-by-type/
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  And you'd have to move and process that one cubic kilometer of water as well, which sounds easy on paper (just use a pump bro) but that's err. 1.000.000.000.000 liters of water. Heating that up by 1 degree takes 4 kW per liter, or 4 petawatt for the whole lot. Ridiculous scales, in any case. If I were to think creatively, I'd create a compound or a filter creature that accumulates gold particles naturally and concentrates it. I have no clue what that involves.