Enhanced drillhole planning

Integration between new Drillhole Planning tools and the Vulcan Drillhole Optimiser provides geologists with a streamlined end-to-end drill planning process.

Production geologists, who spend a large part of their working hours designing and managing drilling operations, will be able to automate repetitive tasks, greatly reducing the time required to generate long term conceptual drilling and day-to-day production designs.

In Vulcan 2020.2 we introduced new drillhole planning tools under the Geology menu for GeoModeller or GeostatModeller licence users.

The Drillhole Planning sub-menu features new options to evaluate drill density and create drill targets.

The Evaluate Drill Density option illustrates the current density of selected drillholes within a triangulation, based on user-defined distance ranges, giving a clear overview of where to focus drillhole planning.

Create Drill Targets quickly and easily creates drilling target points within a triangulation based on user-defined grid spacings.

The scope of this new tool is much wider than simply creating drilling targets. For example, it is perfect for making mid surfaces from solids that can be used when creating anisotropy models and creating grids of collar points across a topographic surface.

The latest drillhole planning tools pave the way for the development of a wider suite of capabilities.

Users will be able to define desired drillhole orientations, extend holes a set distance beyond the footwall of a triangulation, create wedge drillholes, apply deviation based on rates automatically calculated from previous drilling, automatically adjust collar locations to account for drill rig setup constraints and calculate estimated drilling costs.

Drillholes will be able to be exported into CAD layers, CSV files and directly into Isis drillhole databases.

Ongoing development will see a highly sought after feature for creating drillhole hazard cones to help in potential breakthrough interactions.

Reports will highlight the hazard objects, how far down the drillhole interactions are expected and how close to the drillhole the interaction occurs.

Combining these drill density and targeting tools with the Vulcan Drillhole Optimiser makes Vulcan the complete package for drillhole planning.

Drillhole Optimiser is ideal for identifying areas that will benefit best from targeted drilling to uplift the resource when defining a life-of-mine conceptual drilling budget.

That Drillhole Optimiser output can then be brought into the Evaluate Drill Density option to assess the geological confidence and support justification for proposed budgets.

Drillhole Planning tools due later in 2021 will further enhance the interoperability with Drillhole Optimiser, with output being used in Edit Drillholes to extend holes, rename them and apply deviation.

Feedback from customers has provided impetus for this transformational development that goes beyond expectations.