Simulation Framework for Economic Modeling of Mineral Resources

This paper describes an approach to include uncertainty over the commodity price when modelling the economic attributes of a mine plan for a mineral resource. The approach starts with a method to generate price paths from a broad historical set to establish a set of price paths, where the NPV is calculated for each path to generate a distribution for the NPV. It goes on to describes how to use this distribution to compare different mine plans in a manner that is similar to stress testing.