Latest news from Geovariances mining consulting corner

November 23, 2016

Late summer has been a busy period for our consultants who have been involved in various consulting or training projects all around the world.

Prediction of plant performances for Votorantim in Brazil

Christophe Bessin, Resource Evaluation Consultant at Geovariances, was involved in a joint project with our office in Brazil for Votorantim as a precursor to further collaboration between the two offices to better service our Brazilian market. The aim was to help derive adapted multi-linear regressions for improving the predictions of plant performance at one of Votorantim sites.

Short term variability modeling for BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance in Australia

The purpose of the project was for Geovariances to investigate possibilities for modeling the uncertainty of thickness and coal quality variables on selective mining units (SMU’s) in key deposits of the BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance. The idea of the project was to use conditional simulations to benchmark confidence intervals based on co-kriging variance. Following the success of the first project at Blackwater, a second project is currently being implemented for another BMA operation (Peak Downs).

Training session for Dundee Precious Metals in Bulgaria

As part of their process of developing sound geostatistical workflows, Dundee Precious Metals asked Geovariances to organise a second training session of high level geostatistics at their offices of Chelopech. The course dealt with non-linear estimation such as Multiple Indicator Kriging (MIK) and Localised Multivariate Uniform Conditioning (LMUC), along with Conditional Simulations and their applications (Recoverable Resources, Classification, determination of a grade control sampling mesh).

Contribution to Horizon 2020 Project Real-Time Mining in Europe

The H2020 project on Real Time Mining has reached a milestone on October 1st (compilation of the 18 month technical report). The various contributions from Geovariances (testing of data assimilation and gradual integration methods, quantitative risk analysis based on conditional simulations and scenario reduction, sequential updating of geological envelopes based on hyperspectral variables) are currently being compiled with that of the other partners by the project coordinator.