Application of disjunctive kriging for estimating economic grade distribution in an iron ore deposit: A case study of the Choghart North Anomaly,Iran

Most significant iron ore deposits in Iran are located in Central Iran Zone. These deposits belong to the Bafq mining district. The Bafq mining district is located in the Early Cambrian Kashmar-Kerman volcanic arc of Central Iran. Linear estimation of regionalized variables (for example by inverse distance weighting or ordinary Kriging) results in relatively high estimation variances, i.e. the estimates have very low precision. Assessment of project economics (or other critical decision making) based on linear estimation is therefore risky. Non-linear estimation methods like disjunctive kriging perform better and the lower estimation variance allows less risky economic decision-making. Another advantage of disjunctive kriging is that it allows estimation of functions of the primary variable, which here is the grade (Fe %) of the ore. In particular it permits estimation of indicator functions defined using thresholds on the primary variable. This paper is devoted to application of disjunctive kriging method in Choghart North Anomaly iron ore deposit in Central Iran, Yazd province, Iran. In this study, the Fe concentration of Choghart North Anomaly iron ore deposit was modelled and estimated. The exploration data consists of borehole samples measuring the Fe concentration. A Gaussian isofactorial model is fitted to these data and disjunctive kriging was used to estimate the regionalized variable (Fe %) at unsampled locations and to assess the probabilities that the actual concentrations exceed a threshold value at a given location. Consequently a three dimensional model of probability of exceeding a threshold value and the estimated value are provided by disjunctive kriging to divide the ore into an economic and uneconomic part on the basis of estimation of indicator functions using thresholds grades defined on point support. The tools and concepts are complemented by a set of computer programs that are applied to the case study. The study showed that disjunctive kriging can be applied successfully for modeling the grade of an ore deposit. Results showed that the correlation between the estimated value and real value at locations close to each other is 81.9%.