Speaker: Guillaume Pirot

Date: Thursday 18th of January 2024, 1:15pm.

Abstract:

The mining industry faces various challenges to satisfy the increasing demand of minerals for clean energy transitions. One of them is to improve geological characterization at the stage of undercover exploration. This usually requires costly drilling operations. Can we reduce our exploration footprint and costs while reducing geological uncertainty by optimising our drilling location design? Here I propose two ways to look at this problem, based on data from the Hamersley basin, WA, Australia. One examines legacy drillholes in the area and investigate the impact of removing drillholes on the quality of geological models. The other one explores an iterative drilling optimisation approach to reduce modelled geological uncertainty, based on a synthetic case.