Check out these HE1 facts6 Apr 2024 22:45
In 2013, Tom Abraham-James and Josh Bluett, geologists and mates from Australia, were on a holiday road trip to Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Like any good mineral explorers, they kept a copy of Industrial Minerals in Tanzania: An Investor's Guide in their Land Cruiser. Several of its pages described hot springs in the East African Rift that seeped a seemingly boring, inert gas. It was mostly nitrogen, the guide said, with between 4.4% and 18.2% helium by volume. That's 10 to 100 times more helium than is typically found in natural gas, the usual source. “We thought there was a discrepancy with the decimal places in the article,” Abraham-James says.
But after the researchers traced the data to their source—geological surveys from the 1950s—they began snatching up mineral leases. By 2015, they had founded Helium One, based in Bergen, Norway. And last week, they disclosed details about their claims to three massive fields of helium—a nonrenewable resource and precious commodity not just for purveyors of party balloons, but for scientists and medical technicians who need to keep things really cold. (Liquid helium, with a boiling point of 4 K, is the world's best coolant.)
The firm's best-characterized reservoir contains 1.5 billion cubic meters of helium, enough to satisfy world demand for 7 years. Two other nearby fields could contain much more. But the announcement is not just about size; unusually, Helium One plans to find and extract helium as a standalone product, rather than by sieving it from natural gas. “This is the first time that anyone has prospected for helium in a deliberate way,” says Chris Ballentine, a geochemist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who presented his analysis of Helium One's fields last week at the Goldschmidt Conference in Yokohama, Japan.
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