On June 13 , 2010 the New York Times splashed a big "scoop" across page one: A US Army survey discovered that Afghanistan has a load of untapped minerals worth a cool trillion dollars.
To find a previously untapped supply is worth celebrating, even when the news is bad.
The UN estimates that Congo has untapped mineral reserves worth $24 trillion.
Alex Salmond has again insisted this week that untapped reserves are worth some £1.5tn, while UK ministers are in Aberdeen for three days to tout the UK's oil expertise to a delegation from Mozambique led by President Armando Guebuza.
In the past few years, vast deposits of untapped mineral wealth worth billions of dollars have been identified in Afghanistan, and the Afghan government hopes these deposits of copper, oil, gold, iron ore and critical industrial metals like lithium could provide valuable revenue for the country as international financial support begins to wind down.
In the troubled DRC region, there are thought to be trillions of dollars worth of untapped minerals.
When it launched the bullion trading website in 2014, the Royal Mint pointed to research by the World Gold Council suggesting that there is potentially £4bn worth of untapped demand for gold investment within the UK alone.
The Office for National Statistics put the worth of untapped reserves to the UK Treasury at closer to £120bn while Sir Ian Wood, a leading offshore oil industrialist in Aberdeen, put the figure at 15bn-16.5bn barrels.
Even bankrupt companies can find hidden opportunities in their patent portfolios: TM Patents, for example, was split off from the defunct Thinking Machines Corporation two years ago precisely in order to realize several hundred million dollars worth of untapped royalty potential in its patent holdings.
Familiar has an incredibly simple yet compelling value proposition, namely that billions of screens worth of untapped real estate are worth taking advantage of ….
And the hedge fund pointed to Darden's real estate holdings as a potentially huge untapped trove of riches whose worth it estimates at $4.1 billion.
