Gold is a metal obtained from the earth's crust. Since it is largely an inactive metal, it does not normally occur in combined state with other metals. However, physical combinations with silver are quite common. In fact, all gold that is extracted from the earth's crust contains a presence of silver to the extent of about 10%, though some extracted samples known as electrum can contain as much as 20% of silver. To make gold acceptable and usable, it becomes important to remove this silver. However, since silver is also not a highly reactive metal, the separation process becomes difficult.

In most parts of the world, the gold obtained within the earth's crust is often mixed with other materials of the crust such as sulfides and quartz. These are very difficult to refine for gold and the process can turn to be quite expensive. High end chemical reactions need to be carried out in specialized environments and with specialized apparatus. The costs of such processes may be as high as $800 to refine 10 ounces of gold.

1. The actual process of obtaining gold from the earth is quite painstaking and patience-consuming. Gold needs to be prospected, i.e. the areas where gold might be present need to be found out. In some areas, still manual processes such as sifting are used. These methods were much in vogue during the various gold rushes in various parts of the world where gold prospectors would sift tons of soil in the hopes of getting gold. Of course, there are more sophisticated processes today such as detecting by electronic devices.

1. However, this is not the end of the problems. The various processes involved in the chemical separation of gold from its impurities make the process quite complicated and expensive. Gold refineries find running costs too high if they do not mine out a fixed amount of gold each year. Gold needs to be purified too. This purification is done by reactions with the very extremely expensive and toxic sodium cyanide. The toxicity of this substance makes the process riskier and increases costs due to safety measures that need to be used.

There is another method of refining gold too, which is from scrap gold. America's largest gold buyer, Cash4Gold specializes in refining scrap gold brought from people and then reworking it into new items for sale. Even in scrap gold there might be added metals and all gold samples obtained may not be of a common purity. This calls for electric processes to purify gold as much as possible. The process used by Cash4Gold brings gold to a purity of about 99.95% which is then further circulated in the market. However, the electric methods used for the refining of gold increase the costs of the process. Simpler methods are available, but they cannot guarantee high purity of the gold obtained. Some costs can be reduced by methods such as adding aluminum to the electrolyte so that gold extracts faster.

There are difficulties in the refining of gold and these are partly responsible for the high cost of the metal. The purer the gold is, the more difficult will be the process of its refining.