The emergence of geometallurgy over the last decade has resulted in formalised practice groups within the mining industry leading to routine inclusion of geometallurgical attributes in mine scheduling and planning. The purpose of geometallurgy is to generate ore body knowledge fit for manufacturing purpose which can be used to predict and optimise key mining and processing performance operations leading to highest value saleable product and sustainable waste storage.Current geometallurgical programs are designed around systematic testing of representative future ores involving composite samples of drill core. Testing involves either physical protocols representing specific processing performance (e.g. laboratory testing for breakage functions and flotation recovery) or proxies for processing performance (e.g. predictive multivariate functions based on chemical assays or bulk mineralogy). This has been supported by development of field and laboratory-based small-scale tests suitable for application to drill core, with cost structures that enable application to many hundreds or thousands of geometallurgical tests suitable for geostatistical population into long term resource block models.
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