Quantitative mineral resource assessments. An integrated approach / Количественная оценка минеральных ресурсов. Комплексный подход

Every day, somewhere in the world, decisions are made about how public lands that might contain undiscovered resources should be used or whether to invest in exploration for minerals. Less frequently, decisions are made concerning mineral resource adequacy, national policy, and regional development. Naturally, the people making the decisions would like to know the exact consequences of the decisions before the decisions are made. Unfortunately, it is not possible to inform these decision-makers, with any certainty, about amounts, discoverability, or economics of undiscovered mineral resources. The kind of assessment recommended in this book is founded in decision analysis in order to provide a normative framework for making decisions concerning mineral resources under conditions of uncertainty. Our goal is to make explicit the factors that can affect a mineral-related decision so that the decision-maker can clearly see the possible consequences of the decision. This means that we start with the question of what kinds of issues decision-makers are trying to resolve and what types and forms of information would aid in resolving these issues. This book has a different purpose than academic reports common to many assessments, and it is not designed to help select sites for exploration. The audience for products of assessments discussed here comprises governmental and industrial policy-makers, managers of exploration, planners of regional development, and similar decision-makers <...>

1 Introduction

2 Mineral Resources and Society

3 Descriptive Models

4 Deposit-Density Models

5 Economic Analysis

6 Grade-and-Tonnage Models

7 Delineation of Permissive Tracts

8 Estimating the Number of Undiscovered Deposits

9 Integration of Grades, Tonnages, Number of Deposits, and Economic Effects 

10 Exploration Risk 

11 The Future of Quantitative Resource Assessments