/ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Designing resource drilling as an investment decision and not a cost by Andrew Dasys, President at Objectivity.ca
If you could, would you take the opportunity to de-risk a mineral property faster: • without changing the qualified person’s sampling requirements, • without affecting existing drilling accuracy, • without adding new constraints to the production department, • without needing any new capital investment, and • while decreasing in field risks at the rigs. Not only does it sound like a no-brainer it is also an objective that mining has to be able to reach. Bringing mineral resources into production quicker is critical to improve how the investment world sees the mineral industry. In 2019, a study by MineEx Consulting1 summarized that between 2005 to 2017 the cost of finding and bringing a Tier-1 property into production increased 3.8 times, while the meters drilled increased 2.8 times. Even more interesting is that the value of metal found between 2008–2018 is less than the cost required to find it giving the industry a ‘bang per buck’ of 0.55. Objectivity.ca is trying to help solve part of this problem by focusing on increasing the efficiency of drilling and de-risking a late-stage mineral property. What we have found across a range of projects is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) software and changing practices can make a bigger improvement than faster drills. Since being selected as a semi-finalist in the Integra/Goldcorp’s Disrupt mining challenge, Objectivity’s resource optimization system (DRX), which stands for ‘Drilling, Reporting, and Targeting, where X marks the spot’, has been used globally to improve drilling efficiency on a wide range of resource drilling projects. DRX is an Artificial Intelligence tool which ad1 www.minexconsulting.com 32
dresses industry needs and maximizes the use of limited capital and human resources to improve project execution. When compared to existing drill layouts, DRX’s AI algorithms increased resource conversion efficiency by more than 20% in 95% of the cases. These projects included underground drilling, surface drilling, combinations of the two, with and without actively deviated drilling. Improved efficiencies were obtained regardless of the drill plan and deposit type. The efficiency improvement, calculated as the number of meters required to upgrade a cubic meter of resource from inferred to indicated to measured, can either: • decrease drilling time, • reassign budgeted meters to discovery or step-out drilling, and/or, • increase the tonnes/Oz of metal being de-risked for a given amount of drilling. Having the capability of quickly generating complete drill programs meeting all site constraints, provides the project teams with improved confidence in their drilling designs and in the program’s expected deliverables. This significantly reduces the risk of delineating or upgrading any project.
You already own ‘clean’ data Unlike many machine-learning based exploration targeting systems, DRX does not rely on finding multi-dimensional relationships within historically collected geoscience data. Instead, DRX focuses on maximizing the value of the drilling investment based on information available in most technical reports. This means that all projects that have an initial resource have ‘clean’ data that can be immediately used to improve the next phase of resource development - data quality and quantity are far less of an issue.
‘The El Peñón post drilling analysis indicated a 15–40% reduction in drilled meters required to convert inferred to indicated resources between the manual drill planning and Objectivity’s DRX optimized drill plans, demonstrating the significant cost savings potential of the tool/ process. DRX was one of the AI technologies deployed at El Peñón’, said H. Marsden, Yamana Gold Senior VP of Exploration
Coring Magazine #16
