Geostatistics for the Mining Industry: Applications to Porphyry Copper Deposits

This book covers the main mining issues where geostatistics, a discipline founded in the 1960s to study regionalized variables measured at a limited number of points in space, is expected to play a role. Each chapter of the book is associated with a stage of the mining sequence, including the interpretation and geological modeling of mineral deposits, evaluation of in-situ and recoverable resources, long-term mine planning, short-term planning and ore control, geotechnics, geometallurgy and sampling.

This work, featuring more than 150 illustrations, avoids the traditional laborious and crippling theoretical treatment of geostatistics and is systematically oriented toward a practical exhibition of the problems and proposed solutions. The writing is fluid and intended to involve the reader. The book is the fruit of more than 35 cumulative years of applied research by the authors, a professor at the University of Chile and a researcher at Mines ParisTech, carried out in collaboration with the Chilean company Codelco since the late 1990s.

Despite focusing on copper porphyry deposits, the generalization of the methods presented to the entire mining industry is straightforward. The broad range of problems addressed, including generally neglected disciplines such as geotechnics, geometallurgy and sampling, and their practical presentation make this book unique and usable by a very wide audience – students, researchers, geologists, engineers, geotechnicians and metallurgists.

Xavier Emery is a Civil Engineer in Mining and a PhD in Geostatistics from Ecole des Mines de Paris (Mines ParisTech). He is currently a full professor in the Department of Mining Engineering and principal researcher at the Advanced Mining Technology Center at the University of Chile. He is the author of more than 100 publications in scientific journals on the development of new tools, geostatistical models and algorithms and their application to the evaluation of mineral deposits. He has participated in research projects funded by the Chilean Commission for Scientific and Technological Research, by foundations promoting applied research and by mining companies. He also co-organized the eighth International Congress of Geostatistics, held in Santiago de Chile in December 2008. For more than 35 years, Serge Antoine Séguret has been a research engineer in the Centre of Geostatistics founded in 1968 by Georges Matheron (Paris School of Mines, now Mines ParisTech). After obtaining his PhD in Geostatistics and researching in marine geophysics and petroleum reservoir modeling, he focused on mining problems, working with Codelco (Chile), Vale (Brazil), Eramet Sud America (Argentina) and several large companies in Australia.

Serge Séguret is the author of numerous publications and lectures and gives courses at Mines ParisTech, the University of Lorraine and partner companies. He is a registered European Geologist (competent person in salar lithium resource modeling). Alongside his professional career, Serge is a former European record holder in sky diving, builds and flies aircraft he has built, and his science fiction novels have sold well.