A full quality control (QC) program is now a mandatory component of “Best Practices” for mineral exploration in Canada, Australia and South Africa, and is dictated in Canada by National Instrument 43-101. With a bit of planning, a well-designed QC program can detect contamination, salting, sampling inconsistencies, sampling over-selection, laboratory biases, analytical procedural errors, sample mis-numbering or mis-ordering, degraded analytical detection limits and changes in mineralogy. Most importantly, a QC program can quantify both the accuracy and precision of the entire sampling and analytical process. Knowledge of these two quantities provides an estimate of the potential risk associated with calculating an average grade of a drilled mineral deposit.
Smee and Associates has more than 15 years of experience in designing and implementing QC programs for the mining community. These programs have been proven to successfully pass the most stringent of audits on the largest exploration projects.
