Recovery methods with Comparable Helium Gas Streams10 Feb 2024 22:44
There seems to be a lot of confusion around the Helium gas streams & how it would be recovered.
Let me try & explains things to some extent - for the record I'm just a private investor, not a geologist nor have I worked in the oil & industry.
In 2003 I was involved in trying to buy a producing Helium field as well as oil & gas production in the 4 corners area of the USA.
The assets were on Navajo Reservation land - Dineh-Bi-Keyah - Arizona & Beautiful Mountain New Mexico, plus a couple of other fields that aren't relevant to this posting.
Dineh-Bi-Keyah was a significant oil field in its own right (18M+ BO recovered) located at a shallow depth 2,800ft, below it was a separate Helium field who's gas was 80% Nitrogen, 12% CO2 & 5.3% Helium.
Beautiful Mountain on the other hand had wells of various Helium concentrations from 4.25% to 6.13% with an overall average of 5.3% the rest of the gas stream was 93% Nitrogen.
The Helium was recovered to 99.5% purity through a PSA plant (pressure swing absorption) & picked up by tankers from the tailgate.
I strongly believe this is the method HE1's will use to recover its Helium rather than through a cryogenic plant. A PSA is modular & less costly to run but even it requires a lot of electricity to run.
Since the HE1 gas stream doesn't have measurable CO2 in it, it won't require an Amine unit (s) to remove it & Amine units weren't cheap to buy in 2003. Helium was $45 an MCF back then.
So its not new science, its been proven to work with fields of similar grades of Helium to that of HE1.
There were 4 major gas company's back then, instead of the current 3, but you can be sure each of those 3 company's will be sharpening there pencils right now, ready to make a take or pay deal (or such like) with HE1 once they have an idea of initial production capacity & reserves.
LOTM
Sign In
Follow the stocks
