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"the Tanzanian Govt will come in with a low cost loan scheme imo"

The TZ banks or prospective JV partners will come into Songwe Helium when HE1 has an independent CPR that confirms they have proven reserves that are commercially viable to extract (as the CEO alluded to in the last interview, about pushing the numbers up to advance discussions with investors). Hopefully the appraisal phase they will be starting on now leads to that outcome.

I shouldn't think the board had much say in it, like last time. The investors call the tune and the Nomad/broker/MM will build their books accordingly. They'll have a target in mind and the discount retail offer does provide a rather convenient mechanism to soften the price before they come in for their discount. Some might even think the £10m was made already from trading the share range between 0.85p and 1p for months, allowing them to lend it back now at half price and hope to make a decent return trading it up. But that would of course be a highly skeptical and conspiratorial view on how AIM works.

You topped up £40k from your pension fund on falling share prices just before the announcement of a 20% further discount offer? Good luck!

Just to add that the ten day VWAP is actually rising rather than falling ta the moment, due to the declining volume of recent days at the lower prices compared with the earlier high volume days at higher prices. Maybe somewhere around 0.75p now, which might translate towards an offer closer to 0.6p

Alwaysbelieve90 - thanks for your concern. I don't know whether you or LSE deleted your accounts (again) but let's be clear for the record that I haven't advised anyone whether to buy, sell or hold, while you repeatedly advised shareholders to hold or top up throughout a sustained 40% drop in price that was predictable from the date of the RNS. Anyone following your advice has currently lost a lot of money (on paper). I genuinely do hope you make money back on the retail offer and recovery, if you're invested.

WKW - you're still being particularly pessimistic though, which is fine, each to their own. But keep in mid the business plan is to pump first gas to market from Colorado in 2025 and from Rukwa in 2026 (from the early stage production system). The appraisal of Itumbula flow rates is of course pre-requisite to any real investment decision but there's no intention of waiting 'ten years' for gas.

The CEO and CFO will have to shoulder the technical defence of what happened to the money from the previous raise last August, and why that didn’t achieve the stated objective of the Colorado acquisition to reach first revenue (and why that budget has now doubled).

They would need to RNS any ‘new’ news so certainly keep an eye for that possibility in the morning. But from the chair comments it sounds like Option A - we’re an early stage small cap company, pre-revenue, we need the capital to realise our first revenues, and in this market the investors name their terms. We’re sensitive to our long suffering shareholders but still optimistic of achieving our primary business goal to become a helium producer before the end of 2025, Rukwa remains a longer term project with potentially global significance, etc

Very hard. If the retail offer did take the market price down with it to 0.54p, and if the institutions then chose to convert on that price for 0.44p, then their £10m would be worth around 37% of the resulting mcap, which they could then trade into rises from there, if they chose to. But that’s a lot of ifs and a low case scenario, which could be turned by changing events.

The difficulty for the market is in trying to judge bottom against a 20% discount offer based on a rolling ten day average. Once the market knows the retail offer date/price it may be easier to judge. Hopefully news of that this week. Roughly speaking, the VWAP has been trending to somewhere below 0.7p, which might put the discount opportunity somewhere below 0.55p. The test then is whether the SP bounces or trades down to meet the offer price (as often happens in IPOs), and then whether the institutions choose to take their further 20% discount from that, or not. Alternatively the meeting could be accompanied by surprising good news. Very hard to judge. Hopefully a positive meeting, although I imagine they won’t get an easy ride from shareholders in the Q&A

Just for reference, the purity of CO2 was higher than expected and they are aiming for the beverage grade market. The two stage processing will extract the CO2 first and then purify the helium from the concentrated residual gas. Those helium prices do seem low too.

Shanghai, 26 July 2025

"Sinopec unveiled two achievements at the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) recently. The “AI-Assisted Development of Polyimide Gas Separation Materials” developed by Sinopec has been successfully selected among the “Outstanding Achievements in Strategic and High-Value AI Application Scenarios”. Furthermore, Sinopec has unveiled its intelligent R&D platform for Molecular Sieve materials at the China AI Innovation Achievements Exhibition.

Polyimide is a key raw material in membrane materials for extracting high-purity helium. Molecular sieves are porous materials that have been widely utilized in petrochemical industries and environmental protection areas. Both achievements have adopted intelligent platforms to enhance R&D efficiency and achieved remarkable results."

http://www.sinopecgroup.com/group/en/000/000/067/67960.shtml

Well, I would say say cautious optimism. The Sinopec plant is a commercial helium extraction plant, it's up and running in it's first year of production. It does exist, it's not theoretical or experimental. So we need to look at the results if they release them, while keeping an eye on the technology as it develops. But also consider whether there might be interest in codevelopment of geothermal plant (e.g. we know Tanzania is investigating geothermal sources for heating seasonal greenhouse cultivation and aquaculture, and Mbeya is one of the regions).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0375650525000409

"The Investors may elect to convert the £10 million Advance into ordinary shares ("Ordinary Shares") in the Company at any time and in any such proportion as they so choose upon delivery to the Company of a notice of conversion ("Conversion Notice")."

The most recent Chinese review articles seem to still favour improved extraction from natural gas, and still regard commercial scale water extraction as experimental or uneconomic. The exception is Sinopec’s project to separate helium as a byproduct from geothermal energy wells in the Weihe Basin. That’s really interesting because they’re piloting the same process technology that HE1 proposes (although their geothermal energy plant covers the costs and helium is intended as a bonus product during the non heating season). The parallel development is by researchers in Germany, although that’s still in lab stage rather than field technology. If these projects do prove commercial then happy days, although both assume the primary basis is building a geothermal power plant and then extracting helium from it.

https://crm-geothermal.eu/2024/02/12/milestone-reached-for-helium-extraction-from-geothermal-fluids/

Thanks, I got the paper from the link but section 3.2 seems to have a different heading and I couldn’t find the quoted passage (e.g. the word ‘pump’ or ‘waters’ doesn’t seem to appear in a text search).

Do you know which paper the quoted extract is from? I was interested for some bedtime reading but it’s not from the cited paper in the web link and I can’t find another reference for it. It’s not an AI paraphrase of ideas is it?

“Whilst disappointing that we were unable to run the wireline tools further into the Basement target at this time, given the increased helium shows we saw at this depth, we are confident that by casing the well and suspending Tai-3, we will be able to return at a later date and target the fractured Basement helium play which we believe to have significant potential.”

Lorna Blaisse

I guess an announcement shortly after the meeting might put the offer date more towards the end of the week but we’ll see. A good news RNS or just clarity of decision making on Tuesday might boost the share price perhaps? The unknown is whether the market price will converge towards the offer price (it often does), and whether the investors choose a low point to convert their discount, or not.

That was a painful meeting indeed for any CEO, with the Nomad sat literally across the table but pointedly off camera, but she summarised the situation honestly. That's why early stage explorers list on AIM, to access capital under whatever conditions are available. Beggars can't be choosers. Hopefully, if and when they succeed, the boot will one day be on the other foot.