Video News/Rule Symposium 2026

(Kitco News) Bob Quartermain, one of the mining industry's most accomplished discoverers, says the world's best gold deposits are becoming harder and costlier to find, and that the price will ultimately have to rise to sustain production. Speaking with Kitco News at the Rule Symposium 2026, the Dakota Gold CEO and newly named Order of Canada member said remaining deposits are deeper and lower grade than those found in past decades. "Those elephants at depth are rare, and they cost hundreds of millions of dollars to find," he said, adding, "We're just gonna have to see a higher gold price to achieve the amount of production that we're currently seeing now." Quartermain described the recent pullback as "a breather in the bull market," pointing to sustained central bank demand as the structural difference between this cycle and the speculative run of 2011. He noted gold has surpassed US Treasuries as a reserve asset and that China's official holdings have grown from 33 million ounces to over 75 million. Quartermain, who helped discover the Hemlo camp and later built Brucejack into one of Canada's major gold mines, also pointed to silver's growing role in AI data centers and the decline in US gold output, which has fallen from over 10 million ounces a year to four or five since the Homestake mine closed in 2002.