Xavier Emery - Geostatistics for the Mining Industry: Applications to Porphyry Copper Deposits

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Gostatistique de gisements de cuivre chiliens

par: Serge Antoine Sguret et Xavier Emery

First published by Presses des Mines, Paris, 2019,

ISBN: 978-2-35671-562-3

English title:

Geostatistics for the mining industry: Applications to porphyry copper deposits

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sguret , Serge Antoine, author. | Emery, Xavier, author.

Title: Geostatistics for the mining industry : 35 years of research applied to copper deposits / Xavier Emery and Serge Antoine Sguret.

Other titles: Gostatistique de gisements de cuivre chiliens. English Description: Boca Raton : CRC Press, 2020. | Translation of: Gostatistique de gisements de cuivre chiliens (Sguret and Emery), 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2020030090 (print) | LCCN 2020030091 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Copper mines and miningChileStatistical methods. |

Mining engineeringStatistical methods. | GeologyStatistical methods. | Kriging.

Classification: LCC TN444.C5 S4413 2020 (print) | LCC TN444.C5 (ebook) |

DDC 553.4/3015195dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030090

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030091

ISBN: 978-0-367-50575-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-05046-9 (ebk)

DOI: 10.1201/9781003050469

https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003050469

To Pedro Carrasco,

the friend who left us too soon.

To Samuel Emery and Romane Sguret,

our dear children.

Closely or remotely involved, in one way or another, but always with an essential role due to the butterfly effect, the following people have contributed to the content of this work: engineers, geologists, geostatisticians, students, professors, researchers, managers, consultants, journal editors, secretaries. We decided not to submit to the yoke of the alphabetical order; these friends appear below in the order that our memory left them:

Pedro Carrasco, Juan Enrique Morales, Fernando Geister, Julio Beniscelli, Sergio Fuentes, Nicolas Cheimanoff, Pablo Carrasco, Antonio Corts, Jean Serra, Pierre-Yves Descote, Cristian Guajardo, Francky Fouedjio, Nicolas Desassis, Hlne Beucher, Galle Le Loch, Felipe Ibarra, Danitza Aburto, Felipe Celay, Cristian Quiones, Jos Delgado, Rodrigo Riquelme, Ghislain De Marsily and his wife, Christian Ravenne, lvaro Herrera, Arman Melkumyan, Cristian Daz, Serge Beucher, Sebastin De La Fuente, Ricardo Vargas, Juan Soto, Carlos Montoya, Javier Cornejo, Gonzalo Nelis, Mohammad Koneshloo, Mustafa Touati, Adrian Vargas, Bruno Behn, Aldo Casali, Hans Gpfert, Eduardo Magri, Gonzalo Montes-Atenas, Nelson Morales, Brian Townley, Nadia Mery, Mohammad Maleki, Nasser Madani, Amin Hekmatnejad, Manuel Reyes, Margaret Armstrong, Alain Galli, Leandro De Oliveira, Celeste Queiroz, Tony Wain, Francisco Faras, Marcio Soares, Juan-Carlos Alvarez, Luis Candelario, Cecilia Idelfonso, Frdric Rambert, Jacques Deraisme, Franois Geffroy, Claudio Martnez, Ramn Freire, Andrs Brzovic, Paulina Schachter, Karen Baraona, Violeta Ros, Sebastin Gonzlez, Mara Paz Seplveda, Ivn Rojas, Eduardo Jara, Jean-Paul Chils, Jacques Rivoirard, Jacques Laurent, Isabelle Schmitt, Nathalie Dietrich, Vernica Mller, Denis Marcotte, Roussos Dimitrakopoulos, Guillaume Caumon, Claudio Rojas, Silvia Dekorsy and the production team at Presses des Mines, Alistair Bright, Cathy Hurren, Kritheka and the production team at CodeMantra.

Franoise, wife of Georges Matheron, their daughters Laure, Isabelle, Ccile, Lydie.

Special thanks to James Pocoe, for his meticulous reading of this English version of the book.

We also thank the institutions that made possible this work and the research it covers:

• the National Copper Corporation of Chile (Codelco);

• la University of Chile, its Mining Engineering Department and Advanced Mining Technology Center;

• the National Agency for Research and Development of Chile (ANID), through grants CONICYT PIA AFB180004, CONICYT PIA Anillo ACT 1407 (contribution to );

• Mines ParisTech and its Centre of Geosciences;

• ARMINES, the association that manages the industrial activities of Mines ParisTech, among others.

A special mention for Isatis and Matlab software, commercialized by the companies Geovariances and The MathWorks, Inc., with which most of the studies in this book were made.

This book is the fruit of thirty-five years of accumulated experience of two researchers: Xavier Emery, a civil engineer from Paris School of Mines, currently a full professor in the Department of Mining Engineering and a principal researcher of the Advanced Mining Technology Center (AMTC) in the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at University of Chile; and Serge Antoine Sguret, a research engineer at Mines ParisTech (Paris School of Mines) who has been working for more than thirty-five years in the prestigious Center of Geostatistics founded by Georges Matheron (19302000).

Georges Matheron and geostatistics, two names that are inextricably linked. This engineer from the Corps of Mining Engineers of France is the founder of the discipline that today is increasingly called spatial statistics, which also includes the time axis in which the variables studied are sometimes regionalized, as well as the analysis of spacetime fields, frequently found in pollution studies. The story of the discipline and of its founder begins with a field experience at the Algerian Mining Research Office (BRMA), where Georges Matheron worked in his early career.

The reading of two articles by a talented South African mining engineer, Danie Krige (19192013), on the evaluation of mineral resources and the support effect, published in 1951 and 1952, caused a masterful spark that led to the theory of regionalized variables (Matheron, 1965a, 1971). One of the greatest contributions of this theory is a spatial prediction method, used worldwide by tens of thousands of practitioners, known as kriging, a name coined by Georges Matheron (1962a, b, 1963a, b, 1965a) so that nobody, ever, forgets the initial South African contribution.

But the real adventure began at Paris School of Mines in 1968, in Fontainebleau (France), where, little by little, several young researchers joined Georges Matheron to form a team of a dozen passionate people, who could not cope with a considerable demand and were also aware of contributing to the history of applied mathematics at the service of engineering. This team has been constantly renewed, the two authors of this book being part of the third and fourth generations. Like their predecessors, they will have dedicated their lives to their passion and did not make geostatistics a simple job; rather, it is as if they had joined a religion.