Efficient greenfield mineral exploration
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- A growing population will require more metal in order to sustainably build a high quality of life. However, there have been fewer discoveries of mineral deposits due to constrained exploration budgets and confounding geology. There are few practical tools for decision-support in greenfield mineral exploration. This dissertation focuses on developing and testing methods for increasing the efficiency of mineral exploration, with a focus on optimal planning of boreholes. The global context of mineral supply and an overview for mineral exploration is provided in Chapter 1. The necessary elements for modelling decision-making problems are defined and formulations are explained in the context of mineral exploration. Reward functions such as those based on hypothesis falsification or efficacy of information are demonstrated on illustrative cases. High dimensional optimization problems, such as those in the subsurface, are oftentimes intractable. To address this issue, approximations are introduced and demonstrated. Chapter 3 presents a decision-making problem on a real case in Western Australia, formulated as a partially-observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solved using Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) with a belief-based reward function. Belief-based rewards are demonstrated to be more performant than the state-of-the-art solvers, and a sensitivity analysis of performance to the belief-based reward is performed. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis of the optimal plan to a decision-maker's input preference demonstrates how the optimal first decision changes based on a volume threshold. Chapter 4 formulates greenfield exploration drilling using sequential value-of-information, and shows that the selection of a first borehole changes if the decision-maker directly encodes the option of continuing to a second borehole. Discussion of future research directions conclude the dissertation.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Hall, Tyler, (Mining geologist) |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Caers, Jef |
| Thesis advisor | Caers, Jef |
| Thesis advisor | Kochenderfer, Mykel J, 1980- |
| Thesis advisor | Mukerji, Tapan, 1965- |
| Degree committee member | Kochenderfer, Mykel J, 1980- |
| Degree committee member | Mukerji, Tapan, 1965- |
| Associated with | Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Geological Sciences |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Tyler Hall. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Geological Sciences. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/pm892rp3036 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Tyler Hall
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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