The Value of Adaptive Mineral Processing based on spatially varying Ore Fabric Parameters

doi:10.5242/iamg.2011.0265 We show that adapting the mineral processing to the local ore fabric (mineralogy and micro-structure) can substantially improve the profitability of the mine, however, only a proper geoma-thematical methodology using conditional expectations of profits rather than direct measure-ments can avoid losses. Based on geometallurgical exploration data and processing models po-tential gain and actual gain of this approach can be quantified before exploitation commences. Rules for optimal decisions, estimators for the gain of this approach from exploration data, and a method to compute the optimal geometallurgical sampling density are presented