-- Posted Sunday, 3 October 2010 | Digg This Article | Share this article| Source: GoldSeek.com

Friday kicked off the Casey’s Gold & Resource Summit in sunny – scratch that – rainy, Carlsbad, California. With gold hitting $1,320/ounce today, the energy here is incredible. Friday's agenda was corporate presentations, where attendees listened to representatives of twenty of the premier junior mining companies in the world – the best of the best, with operations in the U.S., Canada, Central and South America, Africa, and Papua New Guinea - exploring for or mining, gold, silver, uranium and the industrial metals.

And how better to kick things off at the summit, than to ask: how do companies find potential deposits, anyway?

Truth is, big nuggets of gold aren’t lying around on the ground or the bottom of creek beds any more. If you could see them, they’ve been picked up by somebody. Yet there is a way to detect the potential presence of a gold deposit just by viewing the ground.

You look for a kill zone.

Today we learned what a kill zone is. It’s the product of a sulphide deposit that’s been exposed to the air, oxidizing the sulphur, and then to water, which converts it to sulphuric acid. Which proceeds to kill all the vegetation in the area.

Thus you can fly over a given area and, if you see a sudden patch of naked ground, you can land the chopper for further investigation. Might be a kill zone, might not be. Big if maybe… but it’s a start.

One clear standout of all today's presenters was Ross Beaty, a serially-successful miner who has made fortunes for many an investor during nearly four decades in the business. In fact, if any of the young company execs on hand earns the title of the next Ross Beaty, that’ll be quite an accomplishment.

Ross was introduced by Casey Research’s Louis James as “the broken slot machine.” Louis hastened to add that that may sound like an insult, until you realize what it means. This is a guy whose ventures have proven to be like a one-armed bandit that continually coughs up coin.

His topic was The Five Commodities I Love Best: gold, silver, copper, nickel and, perhaps surprisingly, geothermal energy. Of gold, the metal attendees particularly came to hear about, Beaty predicted that the bull market (which has already run nearly twice as long as the average one) still has ways to go.

Primarily, he explained, because of a heightened demand, especially from the developing nations of Asia, where gold is revered and more people can now afford it; and on rapidly-tightening supply, due to the exhaustion of existing mines and few big replacement mines coming on line.

While Ross is a man who loves gold and gold mining, he saved some of his most optimistic words for geothermal energy. It’s the greenest energy source in the world, as well as the cheapest, and it’s renewable. Generating plants can last, essentially, forever.

The only thing not to like is that analysts tend to value geothermal projects at a small fraction of the multiple assigned to more well-known energy sources, including petroleum, gas and coal. But once the market catches on to what geothermal is all about, Beaty predicts, that will change dramatically.

Over the course of the day, there were hours of presentations by some of the sharpest young men and women in the business. It was a lot to keep track of. But judging by the amount of writing going on at the tables in the conference ballroom, participants were making plenty of notes about their future investments.

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