Multivariate Recoverable Resources Consortium

How would you predict the recoverable resource of a secondary mineral according to a cut-off applied to your main economic mineral?
This is a financial stake mining companies are facing today.
This is why, GEOVARIANCES, together with "le Centre de Géostatistique de l’Ecole des Mines de Paris", proposes a new research project through a consortium named MULTIVARIATE RECOVERABLE RESOURCES CONSORTIUM (M2RC).

Latest News from M2RC...
M2RC 2008 development program...

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A good example of this issue lies in gold exploitation. As sulphurs penalize the gold ore processing, estimating the recoverable grades of these sulfurs according to a given cut-off applied to gold is of crucial importance. Conversely, the presence of silver being often associated with the presence of gold, assessing the recoverable resource of silver according to a given cut-off on gold presents a definite economic interest.

We are fully in the domain of Multivariate Recoverable Resources.

For many years now, ISATIS has been offering you performant non-linear techniques such as Uniform Conditioning, global corrections (through the anamorphosis function) or conditional simulations to estimate local or global recoverable resources with high level of precision.
These techniques have proven their efficiency in the univariate case.

Grade Tonnage Curves according to SMU size

Block simulation outcomes

Le Centre de Géostatistique de l’Ecole des Mines de Paris and GEOVARIANCES are willing to develop new software tools to extend these techniques to the multivariate case combining the Centre past research on this subject and GEOVARIANCES expertise in applying non-linear geostatistics.

The main lines of this project are:
a 2-years project starting in January 2006, with possible one-year extensions;
to provide the consortium partners with new ISATIS plugs-in;
to investigate 3 topics:

the global recoverable resources which involve the histogram fitting and the global support correction;
the local recoverable resources with the Uniform Conditioning technique;
the block simulation approach.

Bases for the first developments are:
equation reformulation and traduction in algorithms;
current algorithms improvement if possible;
classical research work.

This international project is open to all companies. Today, our sponsors are:
AngloGold Ashanti
Areva NC
BHP Billiton
Codelco
Lihir Gold Ltd
Newcrest Mining Limited
Rio Tinto

For more information, please contact Julien Tan.

Bibliography
Rivoirard J. 1984, Une méthode d’estimation du récupérable local
Cahiers du centre de Géostatistique N-894
Emery X. and Ortiz J. 2005, Internal Consistency and Inference of Change-of-Support Isofactorial Models
Proceedings Of Banff (to be published)