Case Study: Leading Coal Mines Company achieves more accurate coal resource uncertainty analysis with Geovariances

Leading Coal Mines Company - Customer Case Study

Geovariances worked with a leading coal mines company to improve how it assessed uncertainty for thickness and coal quality variables on selective mining units. The customer wanted a better way to characterize local uncertainty in coal deposits, especially because quality sample spacing was much wider than SMU size and estimates were often based on ratios, making standard co-Kriging approaches harder to apply.

Geovariances addressed this by using drill-hole spacing analysis with Kriging variances and validating the approach against conditional simulations for thickness and quality variables. The results showed that Kriging variances provided very reasonable approximations to simulation-based uncertainty, with excellent agreement for thickness and good alignment for key quality measures such as ash, fluorine, phosphorous, and sulphur; for example, thickness uncertainty was 5.2% versus 5.0% from simulations, ash was 14.7% versus 11.8%, and fluorine was 40.8% versus 45.6%.