Mineral resource estimation

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Mineral resource estimation is used to determine and define the ore tonnage and grade of a geological deposit, from the developed block model. There are different estimation methods used for different scenarios dependent upon the ore boundaries, geological deposit geometry, grade variability and the amount of time and money available. A typical resource estimation involves the construction of a geological and resource model with data from various sources. Depending on the nature of the information and whether the data is hard copy or computerized, the principal steps of computer resource estimation are:

1. Creation, standardization and validation of the database.
2. Section plotting and interactive geological modeling.
3. Geostatistical analysis.
4. Block modeling and block estimation.