Steve Chingwaru, Geometalurgy Researcher From South Africa Who Found Billions Of Gold Invisible

Steve Chingwaru stands at the DRDGOLD gold reclamation factory in Weltevredenpark, Johannesburg, Doc: Steve Chingwaru

JAKARTA - Chingwaru is the grandson of legendary miners George Nolan who discovered lithium in Zimbabwe. Since a teenage boy named Steve Chingwaru thought the mounds and flat ground that adorn the horizon were a natural feature of the city landscape. Now this 26-year-old man has become a geometalurgy expert and has found billions of invisible gold in the burial site.

Now, almost a decade later, this geometalurgy expert from Stellenbosch University returned to his home place in South Africa. And almost every week he gets offers from various mining companies in the country.

The mining companies want to be assisted to extract the maximum value of the existing gold dust mound.

And this man managed to calculate the total amount of gold mining dust with fantastic value. Its value is $24 billion from 420 tons of 'invisible gold' and buried in the Witwatersrand mine disposal site.

This massive discovery stems from research for his master's thesis which was so impressive that his title was upgraded to PhD.

He is interested in the field of nascent geometalurgy, which combines classical geology with metallurgical and usually involves work at a processing plant. For his academic research, Chingwaru focuses on the disposal of iconic mines in Johannesburg, known as tailing' in the industry.

They have extracted gold from these tailings. But they only managed to remove 30 percent of the gold they were carrying. I want to know what happened to the other 70 percent. Where is their position? Why don't they remove it? 70 percent is a lot, "he said, before laughing, quoted by VOI from Al Jazeera, Sunday, May 19.

His research, which examines samples from mine deposits in Witwatersrand, found that most of the gold is hidden in a mineral called pirite (sometimes called gold stupid'') and is completely ignored by current extraction techniques. We already know how to get gold from pirit, he said, citing an example of Carlin mines in Nevada.

But right now, all tailing processors in South Africa are only extracting free gold using cyanide.