According to research undertake by the state organization, the Chilean Copper Commission, the country's gold manufacture might triple by 2015, putting the South American nation perhaps into the world's top seven global producer.

Chile's current gold manufacture is put at 39.2 tones, but new development and expansions most particularly Barrick's Pascua Lama project might bring output to 103 tones by 2015. Indeed this might even be an underestimation with a amount of other potential projects coming up in the wings.

Much of Chile's present production is byproduct production from the country's enormous copper mining industry, the world's major, but more current discoveries of potential gold/copper ore bodies high in the Andes, which have been made possible by the big current increase in the gold price, could signify that the country's output increase considerably in the years ahead. However the huge problem at the moment is the lack of capital for major gold developments of this kind which need billions of dollars to get them on stream.

Typical of these possible projects is Barrick and Kinross's Cerro Casale scheme in the Maricunga area where the reserve is put at 23 million ounces of gold and 6 million pounds of copper but the capital price of rising the mine is put at $3.65 billion. Kinross previously has its Maricunga deposit, in manufacture nearby and between the two is Exeter Resource's Caspiche examination project which has definite a resource contain 19.6 million ounces of gold and 4.84 billion pound of copper. This would once more be a multi billion dollar scheme, but Exeter is look at a lower cost alternative involving the exploitation of a senior grade core part. Also in the area is Andina's Volcan project with a newest indicate resource estimation of 9.8 million ounces of hold gold and inferred resources of 768,000 ounces of controlled gold at a cut-off grade of about 0.3 g/t Au.

This is a mainly interesting area of Chile for potential high tonnage, low grade, gold projects, frequently with copper as a byproduct. Minera IRL, is the newest company to have announced main potential in the area in acquire an interest in Catalina resources' La Falda project, a porphyry disturbing with gold-bearing banded quartz veins. The banded quartz veins take highly irregular gold values. These veins are the same to those which host resources in the additional huge gold-porphyry deposit of the Maricunga belt in Chile. The major exploration aim at La Falda is thus a multi-million little near-surface gold-porphyry with connected epithermal gold-silver mineralization.