Mineral Resource Risk Assessment: Advancing from Estimation to Simulation

This two-day course will provide the framework for mining professionals to understand the methodology to construct a mineral resource estimate and extend this workflow to conditional simulation for uncertainty assessment. The first day will present the fundamentals for mineral resource estimation, highlighting the main decision-making tasks and their impact on the resulting mineral resource model. The second day will focus on conditional simulation, the practical details associated to its implementation, and its many possible applications to mineral resource risk assessment in the mining sector.

Seminar Outline

Day 1 – Conventional Resource Estimation

1. Key Concepts and Overview of the Resource Estimation Workflow
2. Data Preparation for Estimation
3. Spatial Continuity Analysis
4. Estimation – approaches and parameters
5. Checks for Estimated Models
6. Mineral Resources Classification
7. Discussion on Estimation

Day 2 – Conditional Simulation for Mineral Resource Modelling

1. Key Concepts and Overview of Simulation Methods and Workflow
2. Data treatment and analysis for simulation
3. Simulation parameters and set-up
4. Checks for simulated models
5. Post processing of simulations
6. Applications of simulation
7. Wrap-Up: Estimation vs. Simulation

Prerequisites

There are no pre-requisites for this seminar. Ideally participants should have some exposure to natural resources modeling; however, the broader concepts discussed in the seminar should be accessible to most individuals.

Target Audience

This seminar is best suited to professionals in the mining industry who can benefit from enhancing their knowledge when using, reviewing, and/or constructing resource models for evaluation of mineral deposits. Further, any professionals tasked with evaluating the risk potential associated to a mineral resource may find the model sensitivities and resource uncertainty topics of particular interest.

Speaker

Dr. Oy Leuangthong, P.Eng.

Corporate Consultant (Geostatistics), SRK Consulting (Canada)Inc.

Dr. Oy Leuangthong, is a Corporate Consultant (Geostatistics) with SRK Consulting (Canada) Limited based in Toronto, Canada. She has 20 years experience with geostatistics and 3D modelling of mineral and petroleum resources. Her areas of expertise are in resource estimation, simulation, and classification using geostatistics, with particular interest in multiple variables and trend modelling. Oy has been involved with estimation and simulation studies in multiple commodities including gold, copper, zinc, nickel, phosphate, and uranium in North America, South America, Africa, and Australia. She has authored and co-authored two books, 20 journal papers, and more than 30 conference articles on geostatistics for resource characterization.
 
Prior to joining SRK, she was an Assistant Professor in Mining Engineering at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. She has taught geostatistics in various industry courses to engineers and geologists from national and multinational companies in North and South America, and Africa. Since 2017, she has taught an undergraduate resource estimation course at the University of Toronto. Oy has given numerous presentations at national and international conferences. In 2018, she was voted as one of the 100 Global Inspirational Women in Mining.