Building 3D Exploration Models from Borehole Geophysical and Petrophysical Data

We demonstrate how geostatistical tools can be applied to a petrophysical database for constructing a 3D earth model that honours the statistics of the physical properties observed from borehole logs and cores. The framework for using geostatistics in this study is primarily supported by the presence of a relatively dense spatial sampling of the study area with various borehole information which is otherwise absent or sparsely available in most exploration projects. Conditional sequential Gaussian simulation based on cokriging can be useful to constrain the 3D earth model by incorporating the correlation between existing information of various categories based on a preestablished hierarchy. We show an application where derived stochastic density models can be used for mineral exploration. The proposed strategy for building 3D stochastic models honours the information at all available borehole locations. Thus, this approach is applicable to a wide range of near surface exploration problems in groundwater, environmental and geotechnical investigations.