Pulsar Helium Inc (PSRHF)

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Drilling for helium in the woods of Lake County
A precious element that’s new to Minnesota mining
| February 22, 2024

By Janna Goerdt, Staff Writer
If all goes as Thomas Abraham-James hopes, northern Minnesota may one day produce a supply of a critical element that is needed world-wide.

It’s not the palladium, platinum, copper, or other precious metals that mining companies are trying to extract. This product is lighter than air, colorless, odorless, tasteless, but still necessary for a wide range of high-end scientific applications. It’s in short supply across the globe, with most of it currently produced in Qatar and Algeria.

Abraham-James is mining for helium.

“Fingers crossed,” Abraham-James said on a recent warm, sunny day at the drill site, located off an old logging road in the forest between Babbitt and Isabella, in Lake County. Drillers brought in from the western half of the United States, where drilling for gas is common, were working alongside local contractors to punch a closed hole through 1,800 feet of igneous rock, seeking a large pocket of trapped gas that was accidentally discovered more than a decade ago.

The drilling rig rumbled in the distance as Abraham-James gave tours of the site. A native of Portugal, Abraham-James is the president and CEO of Pulsar Helium, Inc. He and a partner essentially invented the helium exploration industry. And, to everyone’s surprise, northern Minnesota might prove to be a rich mining ground.

“This is our flagship,” Abraham-James said. “Should this be successful, I will be spending a lot of time in Minnesota.”

There have been thousands of exploratory bore holes drilled throughout northern Minnesota. But this hole, and this hole alone, tapped into what geologists believe to be a large pocket of helium and carbon dioxide gas. In 2011, geologist Dr. Phil Larson was working for Duluth Metals. The company was probing the ground between Babbitt and Isabella for platinum and palladium, drilling a series of mineral exploratory bore holes, some more than 3,000 feet deep. All had been unremarkable, until they got to hole number six, and the diamond core drilling rig reached 1,783 feet deep.

First of all, a chunk of bedrock nine feet long shot out the top of the drilling rig and disappeared into the boreal forest. That doesn’t usually happen.

And then came a screaming rush of some kind of gas that sounded like a jet engine. It’s not unusual to encounter small pockets of gas when drilling for minerals in northern Minnesota, Larson said, but they usually bleed off in a few hours.

This pocket of gas was still spewing out gas four days later, with no signs of abating, Larson said. Standing next to it was “terrifying,” he said, because no one had any idea what the gas was.

Larson didn’t know it yet, but what they had tapped into was a first in Minnesota, if not the entire United States.

He dashed off to a Merhar’s Ace Hardware in Ely and returned with a plastic funnel, some vinyl tubing, duct tape and a bucket. He took some samples, sent a sample off to be tested to be sure there was no risk of explosion, and a few days later they were able to seal the hole. When Larson took a closer look at what the gas samples contained, he noticed that they included 10.5 percent helium. He briefly wondered if that was a high percentage, but then, because none of the Duluth Metals bore holes contained the platinum or palladium they were looking for, he shelved the report and moved on.

Fast forward to 2017, when Larson walked up to the Pulsar Helium booth at a mining conference in Canada. He had written down everything he could remember about that one odd bore hole with the 10.5 helium percentage, and he asked Abraham James if he might be interested.

“He kept his poker face pretty well,” Larson remembers.

Abraham-James thought it sounded “too good to be true,” he said. Pulsar Helium is currently trying to develop a helium project in Greenland that flows about .8 percent helium, Abraham-James said. According to the American Chemical Society, helium is also commercially viable to extract from natural gas when its concentration is .3 percent. Given those numbers, the Babbitt area bore hole has an astronomically high concentration.

But once Abraham James heard about the geology of the Bald Eagle intrusion sur rounding the drill site, it made perfect sense. “This is a Goldilocks zone for helium accumulation,” he said.

Thus began years of organizing, lining up investors and experienced gas well drillers, and figuring out the permits needed to drill for a valuable gas in a state where that had never been done before. Minnesotans are used to drilling for rock and mineral samples that stay put.

“It was a long and complicated process to pull a mineral lease to redrill this,” Larson said.

The mineral lease is privately held, and Pulsar is working with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for leases, and the Minnesota Department of Health to guard against any groundwater contamination during the drilling process.

It all came down to 7 a.m. on Friday, February 2, when the single rig drill began chewing into the earth, just 50 feet away from the original bore hole. Abraham-James said he unexpectedly teared up a bit.

“After all the years of work, of traveling away from my family, of starting from scratch, of being the first to try this,” watching the drill spin was an emotional experience, he said.

The drillers have never punched a hole through this kind of rock in search of gas before, Anderson said. Because of that, they don’t know exactly how long it will take, though they hope results start to come in by the end of February.

The drilling rig was brought in from Montana, and it drills through the troctolite (a type of igneous rock) using a carbide-tipped drill bit that spews out a high-pressure fluid. It operates on the same principal as pushing a garden hose into the ground and turning it on, said mud engineer Bruce Butler, who works for Mountain Mud Service and Supply in Gillette, WY. He was monitoring the rig on site to make sure it was flowing properly.

“This is brand-new in Minnesota,” Butler said. “That’s why I volunteered for this. I like to do new things.”

The physical material that emerges from the drilling hole looks and feels like small pebbles. But Pulsar is interested in the gas they expect to encounter about 1,800 feet below the surface. The drilling rig is a closed-loop system, with gas readings for hydrogen, helium, carbon dioxide, hydrocarbons and other gasses being taken every 100 seconds. Samples of any gasses coming out of the hole can also be stored for future analysis.

The world needs more helium, said Cliff Cain, the CEO of Edelgas Group, with offices on Wall Street in New York City. Cain was on-site near Babbitt to monitor the drilling.

“There’s a shortage of helium, and high demand,” Cain said. “It’s a critical commodity for many applications. Maybe Minnesota will be able to help with that shortage.”

No one yet knows what lies below the drilling rig. But Pulsar has conducted some passive seismic surveys of the area, and they “suggest that we are looking at a reservoir with the potential for regional scale,” Abraham James said. Right now the company is trying to replicate and confirm the results of Larson’s 2011 samples, the ones collected with a kitchen funnel and some tubing, the ones that indicated a very high concentration of helium.

“We know nothing about this cavity; we were able to collect zero information,” Larson said. He is now working as an advisor for Pulsar Helium.

“At the end of the day, Mother Nature is in charge,” Abraham-James said. “Now, we’ll be nervously pacing for two weeks.”

But if those encouraging results can be confirmed, then the company will contemplate its next steps, Abraham James said. Possibilities include building an on-site collection plant, with the helium hauled away in trucks, he said.

Pulsar is also committed to keeping the drilling site as low-impact to the environment as possible, and also keeping the project transparent, Abraham James said. That includes opening the drilling site to local media, and even the general public. When Larson signed on as an advisor to the project, he suggested having such tours, to head off any potential rumors about what unusual drilling was going on in the woods.

As Larson was dropping off one tour group at the Babbitt Municipal Center, he bumped into a local who was interested in that drilling site he had heard about, so Larson asked if he wanted to join the next tour. After getting fitted with a safety vest, hard hat and safety glasses, off they went, back to the first potential helium mine in Minnesota.

Janna Goerdt lives and runs a farm near Embarrass. When she isn’t working on the farm, mothering her twin boys, or writing, she likes to prowl the new non-fiction shelf at the Virginia Public Library. She can be reached at [e-mail].

Why is there helium in the ground near Babbitt?

Helium is present in all stars, where hydrogen atoms smash together, forming helium atoms and releasing energy.

Helium is also created in the earth’s crust, as the radioactive elements uranium and thorium decay. These atoms of helium, which are lighter than air, are constantly migrating up through the earth’s surface, where they slip through the atmosphere and off into space, unnoticed.

But the geology between Babbitt and Isabella, where Pulsar Helium, Inc. is currently exploring for helium, is right for trapping those atoms of helium and allowing them to collect for the past billion years or so, said Pulsar CEO Thomas Abraham-James.

The impermeable rock of the Duluth Complex is sitting on top of the suspected pocket of helium, and the mid-continental rift has been stable for a long time, with no fault lines or cracks that would allow the helium to escape. These conditions have created the “Goldilocks zone” for helium accumulation, Abraham-James said.

Why do we need helium?

Although helium is the second most abundant element in the universe (after hydrogen), its presence was unknown to science until 1868. It occurs naturally as an odorless, tasteless, colorless gas that is lighter than air and has no known biological role on Earth.

However, it has become essential for many scientific uses. It is used in cryogenics, to make fiber optics, semi-conductors, MRI scanners, for welding and other uses in the aerospace industry, and to keep satellite instruments cool. It is used to fill weather balloons, in helium-neon gas lasers to scan barcodes at checkout systems, and new helium-ion microscopes that offer better image resolution than scanning electron microscopes.

A mixture of helium and oxygen is used by deep-sea divers and others working in pressurized conditions.

Source: The Royal Society of Chemistry
https://www.hometownfocus.us/articles/drilling-for-helium-in-the-woods-of-lake-county/