Listen to Idris Elba – Gold is only going to become more important

Today, I want to talk about Idris Elba.

You probably know him.

He’s the critically acclaimed actor who has made close to $10 billion at the box office portraying everyone from Nelson Mandela to DCI Luther and Stringer Bell in The Wire.

Excellent. But what’s that got to do with anything?

Well, Mr. Elba is – I think you’d agree – the sort of guy who you sit up and listen to.

So, this week I was delighted to see him discussing the importance of gold.

Sure, it was in a video from the World Gold Council (one he was presumably paid a pretty penny to feature in to boot)…

But the point remains, this is something we believe in very strongly at First Class Metals.

So, as far as we’re concerned, someone with his influence laying out exactly why gold is (and will continue to be) so critical is an excellent way of raising awareness.

Growing demand

If you want to watch the video – and I recommend you do, it’s very good – you can find it here: https://youtu.be/R7UikzYdgTc?si=XLIlYI4WBHY9vU-h

But to summarise briefly for the time being, Mr. Elba travels the world showcasing the wide variety of ways in which gold is integral to societies.

He also looks at the mining side, showing how the process of getting the precious metal out of the ground is becoming more sustainable and supporting a range of local communities.

Perhaps the most interesting section, however, came towards the end, when the actor looked to the future

Here, he highlighted an important reality that underlies much of the work ourselves and many of our peers are doing:

Not only are the existing applications of gold set to remain in place, but new – and potentially enormous – ones are also emerging.

Indeed, while gold will continue to be used to make jewellery and provide a vital crisis lifeline to nations worldwide in the form of central bank reserves…

Its use in new areas like technology… space exploration… and quantum computers is also soaring. And those are just the examples used in the documentary.

Did you know that gold is even used to make the little red lines in lateral flow tests like the ones we all used during Covid?

As the video highlights, this poses what we see as a pretty critical question: Where on earth is all this new gold going to come from?

After all, reserves in the ground only made up around 20% of the world’s total known economic gold back in 2020.

And as the video also highlights, there is only one answer to the issue: We need to find more gold.

Certainly if we want to see the sort of innovation and progress the experts now believe to be possible.

It’s the same as how we need more raw battery metals if we are going to make the successful global transition to electric vehicles.

This, we believe, is what makes the exploration we’re doing in the name of making new gold discoveries so essential.

Our part in this

Now unfortunately, Mr. Elba did not ask us to show him what we were doing at our North Hemlo, Esa, and Sunbeam properties in mining friendly Ontario.

But if he had, then he would have found three properties with steadily growing gold potential.

At North Hemlo, we are seeing increasingly strong samples within the Dead Otter Lake trend north of the iconic Barrick Hemlo 23 million ounce producing gold mine.

At Esa, soil sampling has identified a large anomalous zone and anomalous trends containing promising gold values.

Meanwhile, our prospecting and sampling at Sunbeam is revealing a number of new gold prospects that complement the work we are doing on the project’s historic producing mine.

The next stop at all three projects, of course, is drilling.

And while we don’t know what we’ll find until the bit starts turning…

What we do know that is that any discoveries we do eventually make will help in the global effort to keep up with gold’s increasingly diverse applications. 

If this happens, perhaps Mr. Elba will give us a call – we’re big fans.