The opening of the largest gold mine discovered at the end of 2020 is a very significant economic event that Turkey will be on the date with tomorrow, on Friday.
Söüt, in the northwest Turkish province of Bilecik, will be the location of this significant event for Turkey, the Turkish people, and even foreign investors and businessmen. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will attend.
President Erdogan will personally cast the first gold ingot following the mine’s formal inauguration in Turkey. The amount of gold discovered in this mine is 109 tons, with an estimated worth of $6.5 billion, according to Turkish media reports.
A new commercial finding of gold with reserves surpassing 3.5 million ounces was also reported by Fahrettin Poyraz, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the “Gübretaş Mining Company,” at the end of 2020.
Despite the high prices of the gold that has been found and the amounts that have also been found, the “Gübretaş Mining company “indicated that its impact will be extremely great on the Turkish economy specifically and the rest of the other sectors generally.
According to the firm, “this mine is one of the few mines in the world,” and if the average percentage of gold in the world’s mines is taken into account, it may be the first mine in Turkey and among the top five mines worldwide in terms of gold density (2-3 percent). However, this mine has 8.6% gold in every ton of dirt, and the excavations revealed that this percentage can reach 12 and 14 percent in certain areas of the mine.
It is said that in the middle of 2021, Mustafa Varank, Turkey’s minister of industry and technology, declared the finding of silver reserves worth $2.8 million and gold reserves of around $1.2 billion in the eastern Turkish state of Ağrı.
The minister noted that the estimated gold reserves are over 20 tons, or roughly 705 thousand ounces of the priceless metal, while the estimated silver deposits are around 3.5 tons.
The Turkish Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources claims that the country’s gold mining industry started up in 2001 after $2.5 billion was invested by both domestic and foreign investors, noting that the industry supports 6,200 direct jobs and over 25,000 indirect jobs.
The ministry’s statistics also show that Turkey produced around 38 tons of gold annually in 2019, that it holds 2% of the world’s gold resources, and that its gold holdings account for 0.5% of the world’s total reserves.
According to the Qatari “Al-Jazeera Net” website, the Minister of Energy recently said that Turkey will manufacture 40 tons of gold by the end of 2020 and would aim to boost gold output to 100 tons. He also claimed that Turkey would import $25.2 billion worth of gold in 2020.
It is noteworthy that Turkey announced in late 2015 that it had discovered a mine containing about 100 tons of gold in Manisa, western Turkey, which represents 14% of the precious metal reserves in Turkey.
