MINExpo Issue - MINING.com Magazine

Technology
Diamond Exploration in the Canadian Arctic: Teck Cominco Limited
increasing the number of opportunities being explored, it is not
hard to make a case for managing your data assets to support
smarter exploration.
Formal information management solutions address many
of these issues, significantly increasing the value of data resources
by establishing stronger connections between data
and explorers.
Improvements in data access and data management help
to focus geoscientists on the decision rather than the workflow
problems by enabling them to spend more time on interpretation
and knowledge development and less time on data chores and
data management issues. Having a consistently reliable flow of
data to support projects increases the number of projects that
can be progressed within a given budget cycle.
Organizing and managing your data supports effective collaboration
and information sharing within exploration teams, and
also with partners and investors. It protects your investment
in past data acquisition and makes old data more valuable by
enabling it to be leveraged for future projects.
There are also the benefits of improved data security, quality
and compliance with regulatory requirements.
At the end of the day, what matters is reducing risk and increasing
both the speed, time to market, and quality of business
decisions to improve results. Stronger information management
improves performance and delivers better results.
Real World Success
Teck Cominco is one of the companies that successfully uses
mining software. When Teck Cominco looked into making
changes to its exploration technology, it realized the impact
technology had on its business. Technology had changed every
aspect of how it collected, analyzed and shared exploration
data. Everything from data collection and observations in the
field to the style of notations was dictated by how it anticipated
using and integrating that data within its geographic information
system.
However, like most mining companies, Teck Cominco did
not have a global plan or strategy for using technology as part of
its exploration workflow. Development of this strategy became
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a focal point for its Exploration Technology group established
in January 2006.
Alongside the revolution in technology came the data explosion.
Millions of dollars were being spent on geophysical surveys,
field mapping and drilling, to support expanding projects with
more drills than the company had ever had before on any one
project. Much of this critical data, however, was still being used
for short-term projects only, leaving its true value as a corporate
resource unexplored.
Vast amounts of geological, geophysical and geochemical
exploration data were shelved or stored in the corporate library
on CDs, hard disks, maps, and old reports. Some of these
documents were more than 50 years old. Historical field results
were often poorly indexed and lacked the metadata required to
organize them for future use.
Despite a proliferation of tools, exploration data was still
hard to find, use, and share between regional offices, both horizontally
across their operations and, vertically, from exploration
to resource calculation and engineering groups.
What struck Teck Cominco most, however, was not the
size of the problem but the huge opportunity. As a growing
company, Teck Cominco saw both the need and the potential
to establish a data foundation and collaborative platform that
could provide its global teams of geoscientists with faster, better
ways to process immediate prospects and develop opportunities
for the future.
Teck Cominco’s Global Exploration Technology Group director,
Bob Holroyd, says that with the explosion in the number
of drilling projects being worked on, and the amount of data
streaming through, the company saw the benefit of having a
global exploration technology solution. “We wanted a solution
that could scale to our growing data requirements, allowing us
to share vast amounts of data across our company, and support
our team-based approach to exploration,” he adds.
The solution for Teck Cominco meant having one family
of software working together to capture, archive, deliver and
ensure effective use of its data across the entire organization. Its
chosen platform is based on ESRI ArcGIS system integrated with
Geosoft Oasis montaj and Target software to analyze borehole