Transitive kriging for modeling tailings deposits: A case study in southwest Finland

Global mining generates a large amount of mine tailings, which can produce negative effects on the environment. To counteract this, government guidelines and scientific interest have emerged to reuse tailings deposits in innovative ways, converting them from an environmental liability to an economic asset. Thus, the characterization of a tailings deposit is of great importance to analyze the content of critical raw materials, as well as for a possible revaluation of the deposit, facilitating the mining process to be carried out in a more sustainable way. To characterize their chemical composition, information from drilling campaigns can be used. However, the evaluation of resources in tailings deposits has several complexities such as the poor grade spatial continuity and its narrow geometry, reasons for which traditional geostatistics is not adapted to model this type of deposit. In contrast, transitive geostatistics can be an opportunity to tackle this taking advantage of the fully delimited domain in a tailings dam and a different structural analysis. By achieving a better characterization of tailings composition, it is possible to make better decisions for their reprocessing, thus supporting cleaner mining production.