COSMO — Stochastic Mine Planning Laboratory

Matt Quigley, one of COSMO’s first year masters students, recently placed 2nd in the Student Poster Competition at the 2015 CIM Convention in Montreal. His poster was titled “Developing Risk Resilient Mine Production Schedules of Rare Earth Element Deposits Using In-Pit Blending”. The study stresses the need to improve the conventional modelling and planning practices of REE deposits that rely on the TREO representation of material grade. The joint conditional simulation of all 15 REE allows for a more accurate representation of the deposits’ spatial variability as well as the distribution of each individual element throughout the orebody. The simulations were used as input for a stochastic optimization and the results showed significant improvement over the conventional approach. The stochastic schedule was able to mitigate the risk of achieving mineralization and REE blending targets which would lead to improved recoveries and higher cash flows.