Sequential Efficacy of Information for Optimized Geophysical and Drilling Strategies in Mineral Exploration

Peng Li, Jack Muir, Gerrit Olivier, Zhen Yin, Jef Caers

The global energy transition has created an urgent need for expanded critical mineral supply. Projected production from existing deposits and current discovery rates remains insufficient to meet this demand. More efficient exploration strategies are therefore required, particularly in optimizing costly and low-success data acquisition campaigns. To address this challenge, we introduce the concept of sequential Efficacy of Information (sequential EOI), a decision-making metric that quantifies the uncertainty reduction of target variables under proposed exploration action sequences. We demonstrate the framework using synthetic 2D and more realistic 3D porphyry copper systems, evaluating sequential combinations of exploration plans including ambient noise tomography (ANT) surveys and borehole drilling campaigns. With considering multiple experiments, including determining optimal borehole placement, optimizing ANT configurations, and comparing different action-ordering strategies, sequential EOI identified exploration plans that maximized the defined reward function. The method effectively revealed optimal designs such as dense ANT survey followed by large dip-angle borehole in the 2D case, and Pareto-optimal solutions under multi-criteria uncertainty metrics in 3D case. These results demonstrate that sequential EOI offers a practically meaningful foundation for multi-physics, multi-step, and uncertainty-driven plan optimization in mineral exploration, supporting rational decision-making under realistic operational constraints.