Development of a Geostatistical Algorithm to Incorporate Micro-Macro Duality of Geological Features in Mineral Resource Evaluation

Faculty Development Competitive Research Grant Program 2021-2023

The rational of this work is to establish a creative workflow for geostatistical modeling of geo-domains and its application to resource evaluation of ore deposits with micro-macro duality in geological features. This act is usually challenging whenever such 3D model is generated either only by deterministic or stochastic techniques. The former neglects the micro (short-scale) and the latter ignores the macro (large-scale) geological features, respectively; making the ultimate geological block model unrealistic which induces significantly a bias in the downstream activities of a mining project. Therefore, it is crucial to establish a mechanism for reliable and trustworthy geostatistical modeling of geo-domains; addressing the problem of incorporating short/large scale variability of geological features into 3D numerical models that overcomes the mentioned challenges.