Prospecting For Helium

I considered starting this column with some satire such as a headline reading, “RMAG Closing Up Shop Because of the New Fusion Energy Economy,” but I don’t want to scare the membership. We are not going anywhere. Speaking of the product of the fusion achieved late last year, this month is RMAG’s North American Helium Symposium. I’ve never prospected for helium, but I’ve watched colleagues reinvent themselves into successful prospectors for non-hydrocarbon gases like helium, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, as well as fluid-borne critical minerals like lithium.

Recently, and not sarcastically, the US Department of Energy announced that energy-positive hydrogen fusion had been achieved at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California. This news is ground-breaking, for sure, an important first step of many in making hydrogen fusion an energy source for humanity. This is the same process that has been occurring in the Sun at the center of our solar system for billions of years. It is not, however, a near-term or medium-term source of helium. To secure that for humanity, we will need geoscientists doing what geoscientist, particularly RMAG members do best, finding the resource in the subsurface here on Earth.

If you’re an oil and gas geoscientist, the idea of prospecting for helium might immediately bring up

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M a c C r a c k e n . T h i s p o p u l a r t r i p s o l d o u t l a s t y e a r ! questions in your head such as:

• What is its wireline log signature, and on what log?

• Is seismic helpful?

• What geochemical methods are useful for helium prospecting and what labs run those methods?

• What are the sources of helium in the subsurface?

• Are petroleum systems and helium systems related or analogous?

Maybe you are interested in the midstream and business end of the budding helium economy and have questions like:

• Is there such thing as a helium refinery?

• How does midstream work for such a small-molecule, fugitive gas?

• What is the price of a unit of helium? [spoiler: it’s really high]

If you have ever asked those questions, I hope to see you at the North American Helium Symposium seeking answers and engaging with the RMAG membership present there. We also have the March monthly lunch talk by Elizabeth Horne regarding Interpretation, Characterization, and Rupture Hazard Assessment of Faults in the Permian Basin.