Geostatistics: A Powerful Tool in the Evaluation of Energy Resources

Whether it is due to an increasing demand for energy resources, or to increasing environmental and technical constraints on the quality of these resources, the need for improved methods for the evaluation of low grade energy deposits is increasingly recognized. Many mineral deposits, such as uranium deposits, are characterized by skew sample value distributions, typically lognormal distributions. The purpose of this paper is to study the properties of some traditional and geostatistical methods applied to the local estimation of mineral deposits with lognormal value distribution, and to draw conclusions concerning the methods likely to give the best results. Some of these conclusions will be independent of the sample value distribution, and will therefore apply to coal as well as uranium deposits