Prediction of Essential Amount of Exploration Drilling in Primary Stage of Open Pit Mine Planning

Abstract

Open pit Mine planning and initial production scheduling of open pit mine are considered as the complicated issues in mining engineering. The high capital investment in mining projects requires more accuracy in preparing base data. A reliable estimation of grade and tonnage of a mineral deposit has a considerable impact on the success of a mining project and initial capital cost prediction. These estimations depend on number of samplestaken from exploration drilling; therefore, it is necessary to determine the proper amount of drilling to reach rational confidence level of grade and tonnage estimation. In this paper, essential amount of drilling for reaching an acceptable confidence level of grade and tonnage estimation has been investigated. Regarding the feasibility, due to multiple sampling and numerous checks, the average mining grade of some declared tonnage is likely to be known within acceptable limits, say ±5%, and verified by standard statistical methods. For this condition, 5 different sampling grids were generated from the geological block model of Sungun copper mine. The grades of Sungun copper mine block model were considered as the actual grade of each block. Then the block model was re-estimatedconcerning different sampling grids. The Sequential Gaussian Simulation method was applied for re-estimating and considering the grade uncertainty of each block.