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I think a Tier 1 JV is considerable over speculation as they’re not at that stage yet. They’re looking for an industry partner to share in the risk-reward of further appraisal work and data collection. If that leads to bookable helium reserves then they can pitch to finance the early stage production system (provisionally five wells and a modular plant). But a Tier 1 offtaker would be looking further ahead toward the final investment decision for field development beyond that.

Not really, balloon/lift grade helium like that produced from Galactica is usually at a concentration below that useful for high grade applications, like semiconductor manufacturing. It’s either sold to the low grade market or supplied to a purification plant for refinement. There may be high demand for the purified product but unless that plant can add capacity then demand for low grade suppliers might not increase locally or immediately.

MC - although you made a better effort to edit your AI searches this time you did fail to check the current statuses, so you're quoting listed institutional holdings from a couple of years ago in 2024. So unless you have more inside information to report you can't really claim a turning point in fund momentum from institutions that no longer hold (like Aberdeen). At the last published update (back in October) the significant holdings were still rather retail proxy dominated.

Hargreaves Lansdowne 22.99%

Interactive Investor 14.28%

Halifax Share Dealing 7.46%

A J Bell Securities 6.19%

Barclays Wealth 3.91%

Trading 212 3.90%

IG Markets 3.87%

HE1 Employee Benefit Trust 3.18%

It makes a change from copy and pasting all those AI trading bot notifications

Just so

It's possible, and we know they have/had made reference to "supportive long term investors" but there are a handful of funds focused on short term capital events that would happily eat up AIM opportunities if the broker/nomad and the board are prepared to play low ball. It's a bit of a Faustian pact but if you have no other source of capital and don't mind getting your hands dirty it's available on repeat. Sarah Cope would be experienced enough in that game without needing an angel. If there is a more friendly angel then I'd be looking either to Cantor Fitzgerald's O&G arm (which Cope helped to set up), Herbert's capital associates, or the Jersey based trust money that was behind Orca Energy's commercialisation of the Tanzanian offshore gas fields (and where most of the new board came from after Herbert/Stalker bailed from HE1). But that would just be idle speculation.

You mean the people who failed to make a helium discovery during their years with HE1, compared to the people now at HE1 who managed to do that by taking a different approach? HE1 also has no debt, but it does have a discovery, contingent resources and a drill rig.

No it isn't. You can store helium in those tube trailers almost indefinitely.

The main challenge in trucking the helium from Rukwa to DES at scale would be tying up enough trucks to one project, to ensure one arriving and one leaving on a 2,000 mile round trip, depending on the filling time. They're not cheap and it's a slightly clumsy logistic solution. At smaller scale it's not really attractive to a tier one offtaker, who might want c. 250,000 mscf/month to establish a contract. But there are other helium offtakers/carriers in the region, notably South Africa and helium customers in Tanzania. As chilli says, if the exploration companies in the basin can find a way to produce the gas at scalethen building a purification/liquification hub could establish a more economic and strategic regional helium industry supply chain. That's where the tier one offtakers and exporters would really come in.

Yes, that's the basic commercial challenge. There are two sides to it. On the one hand you have much lower capex costs to build a modular helium degassing and pressure absorption plant than you would need to build an oil and gas refinery. On the other hand, you don't have the recurrent cash wealth from the oil and gas to cover your helium opex. The Galactica project provides something of a sweet spot in Colorado because you have free flowing helium gas with lots of CO2, and both gases can be easily monetised into a local market through fairly low cost separation processes. The challenge in Rukwa is that the bulk product is warm water. There's only one pilot project in the world extracting helium commercially in that way, and that relies on geothermal heating/energy for the economic case and refining helium as a seasonal bonus product. If the water could be monetised in Rukwa (publicly or privately), e.g. to build out warm greenhouse agriculture, irrigation projects, or geothermal energy, then it would make the helium opex more attractive. Alternatively, if they did manage to drill some kind of goldilocks zone, or find a trap reservoir, where they could liberate the helium at a high concentration and a high gas ratio then you have a globally unique and profitable venture.

That’s equally ridiculous as there’s plenty of news due. The big win will be the CO2 coming on stream but there’s also the development capital from the raise to allocate for expansion of the production field.

Why would you expect a company to post a market update every time they load a truck? It’s a ridiculous over expectation. The price sensitive ‘news’ was that they achieved the major milestone of first commercial sales. No one’s expecting them to post a second truck. News might be bringing the CO2 on stream, drilling an extra well, possibly securing a significant contract. But I wouldn’t expect to see any early sales figures until at least end of Q2 (HE1’s year end) and maybe a more settled income pattern at end of H2 (HE1’s AGM).

The benign explanation is that it’s not unusual to need a bit of housekeeping on a volatile low liquidity share like HE1. Brokers may use a two step process to secure better execution or volume. For example example platforms like T212 go OTC via smart routing to get best price. If the order book has low liquidity the broker might fill or match the order OTC then ‘correct’ the reporting in a batch later (end of day or after auction).

It’s quite a common occurrence on this share. The prints are corrections in reporting, trades originally made out as OTC but later corrected to the book. That’s supposed to be an ‘error’ correction but it happens way too much here to be coincidental. It has the consequence of masking the trade volume, VWAP and buy/sell indications at the time of the original trade. There are both benign and suspect interpretations available 😉

CT certainly have the advantage of insider data access from real time monitoring on site. The flip side is that they’ll also have the inside track on why it didn’t work out at ITW1 and what further programmes of data acquisition and drilling at other targets are needed to improve understanding. If the chances look good then I’d expect them or Sinopec to show their hand at this stage. If they don’t then it might suggest a longer shot until the evaluative work programme is completed. Of course we’ll only get to know the outcome of the farm out rather than which parties expressed an interest.

That’s my understanding. Of the three variables they already proved a positive helium concentration in the gas to surface, and they proved they can manage large quantities of water. They just need to find out if it can be done without the gas ratio falling, or possibly to pump less water from a richer source.

Https://journal.geomech.ac.cn/en/article/id/d5554795-393c-46fc-8ef4-b3731c69d2bc

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12583-020-1080-9

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2025.1581673/full

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926985125004719

www.yxyqc.net/EN/abstract/abstract2173.shtml

The only people in the world piloting this method commercially are the Synopec in the Weihe Basin in China. There are some Chinese journal papers on the helium system there which has some similarities to Rukwa.

The system is hydrology driven, with deep hot fluids carrying nitrogen/helium gas over distance from volcanic source, which then seeps up via uplifted fractures in the basement rock, through porous interconnected layers to exsolve as free gas at surface. Both HE1 and NHE tried to find shallow trap reservoirs but without success. HE1 discovered they could tap into the basement system more directly and flow small quantities of gas and water to surface naturally at a 1:1 ratio. If they can replicate that at higher flow rates then they may be onto a winner. The problem was that when they pumped more water the gas ratio collapsed, due to dilution from the intermediate aquifer. The hypothesis is that they failed to isolate the well bore. The alternative explanation is that the interconnectivity of layers caused the water to be drawn down into the target area as the pressure dropped there. They need more data and to drill again to test this, which is the reason for the farm out.

Yes, whoever can crack the code to extracting helium commercially from ground water in the absence of hydrocarbons could unlock a significant prize and disrupt the global industry.

It’s a gamble, as neither HE1 nor NHE have had any luck tapping into adjacent permeability from the fractured basement system, that’s why HE1 are trying to target the faults directly. There’s always a chance there are some unidentified and workable trap reservoirs, and 3D data acquisition is probably the way to go, but it’s a long shot given what we know from previous attempts. The 'low prospectivity' blocks are ‘part of the same massive system’ for sure. Whether there’s any decent chance of extracting commercial helium from them is an open question.