William Harding
Principal Consultant and Hydrogeologist
SRK Consulting (UK)
William has almost 30 years of experience in hydrogeology. His particular strengths are in packer test and pumping test design and supervision, well test analysis, groundwater modelling and quantitative risk analysis. He has carried out well in excess of 100 projects for clients in the mining, water and waste management industries to support operations, technical studies for greenfield sites and closure. In recent years, he has been closely involved with and managed a number of open pit and underground mine hydrogeological studies in Europe, India, Africa and the Middle East. He has just completed a hydrogeological and geochemical modelling study for an underground gold mine in the Central Lapland Gold Belt (CLGB) and is currently managing a technical study to support a large open pit operation in Central Finland.
Maximising the value of exploration and infill characterisation work through the piggy-backing of hydrogeological and geotechnical field testing on resource drilling programmes.
Piggy-backing is just a way of extracting the maximum value from a drilling campaign. This value takes several forms: most obviously it saves money for the Client, but because much of the benefit of piggy-backing is seen in early-stage development (when resource drilling is most prevalent), it enables the Client to set-up a baseline monitoring scheme to support their scoping and environmental impact studies at an early stage in project development. It also allows timely management decisions to be made about the water and geotechnical-related challenges likely to be faced by the operation, which is an essential part of project de-risking.
This talk presents the piggy-backing techniques that SRK engineers and hydrogeologists now routinely use to collect information for their Clients and, importantly how the team has, through careful collaboration with the Client and the drilling contractors, devised ways to capture that information with minimal disruption to the overall resource drilling schedule.