What Does an Optimized Drilling Operation Look Like?
It’s an operation where drills maintain high availability, achieve high utilization, work quickly and efficiently, and consistently deliver top performance and contribute to the desired blast outcomes. It’s where:
- Drilling is completed precisely to plan.
- Data collected from Monitoring While Drilling (MWD) systems is used in blast planning to deliver optimized fragmentation, and ore identification for material tracking at the point of drilling.
- The resulting material management enables the delivery of the right physical, chemical and mineralogical material to the right stockpile or crusher.
- People are safer.
- Costs are reduced through automated and highly efficient practices and processes.
Drilling optimization makes it possible to cost-effectively extract lower quality ore grades and achieve maximum resource recovery. And it enables sustainable operations — requiring less fuel usage at the drill pad, reducing energy usage in crushing and grinding, and reducing emissions throughout the mining operation.
Drilling Optimization on the MINExpo Show Floor