Before you drill, you plan. Before you plan, you should simulate.
That's the logic behind what Propel built for surgical mining—a dynamic planning engine that lets technical teams stress-test dozens of drill path strategies in minutes, before a single meter of ground is broken and before a single dollar of capital is committed.
Because in complex geology, the cost of a bad plan isn't just the plan. It's everything downstream from it.
The Problem With Planning in Hard Ground
Drill path planning in complex geology is genuinely difficult. You're working with incomplete information about what's underground, making high-stakes decisions that will shape operational costs, ore recovery, and project returns for months or years. The ore body has an irregular shape. The geology between the surface and the target zone shifts in ways that surface surveys only partially capture. What looks like a direct, efficient path on paper might intersect a fault zone, require a difficult directional change, or push recovery rates lower than the model assumed.
Traditional planning processes are slow by necessity. Engineers build a model, run their analysis, refine the inputs, and iterate—manually, sequentially, over days or weeks. By the time a plan is finalized, the team has usually explored a handful of scenarios at most. Not because they don't want to explore more, but because the process simply doesn't allow for it.
The result is decisions made under time pressure, with limited scenario coverage, and a confidence level that's higher than it probably should be.
What Propel Built
Propel built a simulation engine that changes the economics of the planning process itself—making it fast enough, comprehensive enough, and visual enough to actually improve the quality of decisions before they become irreversible.
Physics-Informed Drilling Simulations
The simulations aren't simplified approximations. They're physics-informed models that account for the actual mechanical behavior of the drill string, the properties of the rock formations along each candidate path, and the forces that cause drift, deviation, and bit wear. The result is a planning tool that reflects how drilling actually behaves in the ground—not how it behaves in a spreadsheet.
Cost, Risk, and Recovery Optimization
Every scenario is evaluated across three dimensions simultaneously: cost, risk, and ore recovery. A path that looks efficient on cost might carry higher deviation risk. A path that maximizes recovery might require a more complex directional profile that adds operational complexity. The engine surfaces these trade-offs explicitly, so the planning team can make informed choices rather than optimizing one variable while unknowingly sacrificing another.
Scenario Comparison in an Engineer-Friendly Interface
Running dozens of scenarios is only useful if you can actually compare them. Propel built a clean interface that lets engineers view scenarios side by side, filter by key metrics, and identify the optimal path without wading through raw model outputs. It's designed for the people who actually use it—engineers who need speed and clarity, not data scientists who need flexibility.
Integration with Operational and Financial Models
The simulation engine doesn't live in isolation. It connects directly to operational and financial models, which means a change in the drill path immediately flows through to updated cost projections, timeline estimates, and recovery forecasts. What used to require a separate financial modeling exercise now happens automatically, in the background, every time a new scenario is run.
The Results
Planning cycles that used to take days now take minutes. That's not a modest efficiency gain—it's a fundamental change in how teams can work. Engineers can explore ten times as many scenarios in the same window of time, which means the plan that gets approved is genuinely the best available option, not just the best option they had time to evaluate.
The engine consistently identifies lower-cost, higher-recovery drill paths that manual planning processes would have missed—not because the engineers weren't capable, but because the search space is simply too large to cover manually.
And perhaps most importantly for sponsors and investors: decisions are now defensible. When a technical team presents a drill plan, they can show exactly which alternatives were considered, why this path scored best across cost, risk, and recovery, and what the sensitivity looks like if key assumptions shift. That's a different conversation than "we think this is the right path."
Where This Goes Next
This simulation engine is also a foundation. The same models that help engineers compare scenarios manually today are the building blocks for automated drill-path design tomorrow—systems that can generate and evaluate thousands of path variants without human intervention, flagging only the top candidates for review.
The industry is moving toward that future. Propel is building the infrastructure to get there.