Appropriateness of Reduced Modified Three-Parameter Weibull Distribution Function for Predicting Gold Production in Ghana

Forecasting mine production is pertinent to gold mining as it serves as production goals for investors. It is therefore important to identify the exact distribution that gold production as a response variable naturally follows. It is even more appropriate to have a model(s) with few predictor variables. This paper seeks to identify appropriate statistical distribution functions for fitting gold production in Ghana. The empirical paper relied mainly on quarterly secondary datasets on gold production between the years 2009 and 2022 secured from the Minerals Commission of Ghana, Accra. Several known statistical distributions including Weibull, Log-Normal, Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) were explored with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and evaluated using model selection criteria as AIC, AICc and BIC. Goodness of Fits were evaluated using Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test (K-S), Cramer-Von Mises Statistic and Anderson-Darling Statistic. Based on the analysis conducted, the reduced modified 3-parameter Weibull distribution provided the best fit for gold production in Ghana. Though the reduced modified Weibull function is proposed, it is important however to recognize that other external factors can influence production levels. Also, the average quarterly fitted gold production is 1000334.8918 ± 75,327.080 (±7.5%) [i.e., 925,007.812 – 1,075,661.972]. This indicates that the average annually fitted gold production lies between 3700031.248 and 4302647.888 ounces at 99.9% confidence level. Therefore, the predicted gold production for the year 2022 is 3.7million ounces at 99.9% confidence level.

Appropriateness of Reduced Modified Three-Parameter Weibull Distribution Function for Predicting Gold Production in Ghana

Forecasting mine production is pertinent to gold mining as it serves as production goals for investors. It is therefore important to identify the exact distribution that gold production as a response variable naturally follows. It is even more appropriate to have a model(s) with few predictor variables. This paper seeks to identify appropriate statistical distribution functions for fitting gold production in Ghana. The empirical paper relied mainly on quarterly secondary datasets on gold production between the years 2009 and 2022 secured from the Minerals Commission of Ghana, Accra. Several known statistical distributions including Weibull, Log-Normal, Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) were explored with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and evaluated using model selection criteria as AIC, AICc and BIC. Goodness of Fits were evaluated using Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test (K-S), Cramer-Von Mises Statistic and Anderson-Darling Statistic. Based on the analysis conducted, the reduced modified 3-parameter Weibull distribution provided the best fit for gold production in Ghana. Though the reduced modified Weibull function is proposed, it is important however to recognize that other external factors can influence production levels. Also, the average quarterly fitted gold production is 1000334.8918 ± 75,327.080 (±7.5%) [i.e., 925,007.812 – 1,075,661.972]. This indicates that the average annually fitted gold production lies between 3700031.248 and 4302647.888 ounces at 99.9% confidence level. Therefore, the predicted gold production for the year 2022 is 3.7million ounces at 99.9% confidence level.

Mercury flows in large-scale gold production and implications for Hg pollution control

Large-scale gold production（LSGP） is one of the five convention-related atmospheric mercury（Hg） emission sources in the Minamata Convention on Mercury. However, field experiments on Hg flows of the whole process of LSGP are limited. To identify the atmospheric Hg emission points and understand Hg emission characteristics of LSGP, Hg flows in two gold smelters were studied. Overall atmospheric Hg emissions accounted for 10%–17% of total Hg outputs and the Hg emission factors for all processes were 7.6–9.6 kg/ton. There were three dominant atmospheric Hg emission points in the studied gold smelters, including the exhaust gas of the roasting process, exhaust gas from the environmental fog collection stack and exhaust gas from the converter of the refining process. Atmospheric Hg emissions from the roasting process only accounted for 16%–29% of total emissions and the rest were emitted from the refining process. The overall Hg speciation profile（gaseous elemental Hg/gaseous oxidized Hg/particulate-bound Hg） for LSGP was 34.1/57.1/8.8. The dominant Hg output byproducts included waste acid, sulfuric acid and cyanide leaching residue. Total Hg outputs from these three byproducts were 80% in smelter A and 84% in smelter B. Our study indicated that previous atmospheric Hg emissions from large-scale gold production might have been overestimated.Hg emission control in LSGP is not especially urgent in China compared to other significant emission sources（e.g., cement plants）. Instead, LSGP is a potential Hg release source due to the high Hg output proportions to acid and sludge.

SD-Gold Becomes the National Gold Production Champion 2017

At the end of January 2018,the China Gold Association announced the gold production of China’s main gold enterprises in 2017.Shandong Gold Group(SD-Gold)ranked first with 43.93 tons of gold production,up by 18.47% year-on-year.SD-Gold’s gold production exceeded that of China National Gold Group Corporation for the first time,and was far ahead that of Zijin Mining Group and Zhaojin Group.