Helium is good for a lot more than fun party tricks like floating balloons and chipmunking your voice.

It’s also state of the art when it comes to coolant for rockets and semiconductors, and it’s considered irreplaceable for many medical devices, including magnetic resonance imaging machines. It’s vital for diagnosing things like cancer, brain or spinal cord injuries, and stroke or heart conditions.

An increasing number of high-tech uses for helium has ramped up demand for this noble gas in recent years, making shortages ever more frequent. 

It represents yet another multi-million opportunity for Wyoming, which has already been hitting the mineral jackpot lately with things like gold mines and uranium mines looking to ramp up in the Cowboy State.

Wyoming today already produces 20% of the world’s Grade A helium from one location, ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek facility in Sublette County, according to the company.

Last year, Exxon announced it would expand its La Barge-Shute Creek facility, which began operations in the 1980s primarily as a natural gas plant. It added helium production a couple years later after finding an 80-year supply of helium on hand. Exxon’s announcement was focused mainly about future carbon storage. 

The company didn’t mention whether helium production will expand at the facility to meet growing demand.

As it turns out, though, ExxonMobil might not be the lone player producing helium in Wyoming for much longer. Another company is now test-drilling for helium on private land in Sublette County, even as it is working through a federal permitting process with the Bureau of Land Management.

The company is Blue Spruce, and the project is called the Dry Piney Helium and Carbon Sequestration Project near Big Piney.

That Magic Helium Place In Sublette County

Part of what’s attracted them to Sublette County is the proven geology of the area, according to Center for Economic Geology Research Director Fred McLaughlin.

“I think they are on the La Barge platform, which is this big, buried structure that allowed gasses to accumulate for probably close to 70 million years,” McLaughlin said. “And that’s one of the secrets to getting helium to slowly build up, because helium is a small atom and it’s super buoyant and slippery.”

Helium is present in the crust of the earth as a byproduct of radioactive decay, but few places on earth have the right geology to trap the tiny molecule and keep it in place long enough for it to accumulate to an economically feasible amount for mining. 

Shute Creek, though, has already shown that this particular location in Wyoming has that magiccombination of things to collect an appreciable amount of helium that can be mined. 

“(Blue Spruce) just drilled a deep, what they call stratigraphic test well, which is very similar to the wells at Shute Creek,” McLaughlin said. “And they are targeting some of those really deep carbon formations in that neck of the woods in Wyoming.”

An At Least 50-Year Reservoir

In an investor presentation the company shared late last year in Denver, the company has billed its project as a direct analog to ExxonMobil’s La Barge-Shute Creek facility.

It also talks about the undersupplied 2023-24 market as well as the strong growth expected for helium demand for semiconductor fabrication, fiber optics, rocket launches, and other high-tech endeavors. 

The $1.5 billion project plan includes four production pads with eight wells that are expected to produce 800 million cubic feet annually of bulk liquid helium, as well as 80 million cubic feet per day of natural gas. 

The lifespan of the resource is at least 50 years and includes a processing plant to separate helium from the gas, as well as five injection wells to store up to 4.3 million tons per year of carbon. The latter should make the project eligible for a lucrative, federal carbon storage tax credits called 45Q, which were part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Blue Spruce expects to begin operation in the fall of 2028, according to recent announcements by Honeywell, which is providing carbon capture technology, and Chart Industries, which is providing helium processing technology.

Other Counties May Also Have Helium

Wyoming does have lots of helium left to mine, according to a recent study by Wyoming Geological Survey, and not all of that helium is necessarily tied up in Sublette County.

Kelsey Kehoe, a project geologist with Wyoming State Geological Survey, completed a report in 2023 that looked at natural gas production where the presence of helium was reported.

The study was prompted in part by supply shortages that she said have caused helium prices to skyrocket. The commodity is generally not publicly traded, so actual pricing is difficult to determine.

Helium is not a renewable resource, and that’s part of what makes it so valuable, as well as difficult to find. Stars produce it as a byproduct of fusion, for example, or you can wait millions and millions of years for it to slowly settle out as a byproduct of radioactive decay.

Yellowstone National Park has a reservoir of helium thanks to all the hydrothermal activity, which helps release helium from the earth’s crust. But most of that likely dissipates into the atmosphere, according to the scientists who are studying that helium reservoir, looking for clues to the earth’s fiery magma core.

As the second-lightest element on the periodic table after hydrogen, helium is an expert escape artist. It’s slippery, and since it floats, it tends to find ways to escape containment, no matter how advanced the technological device, ensuring we always need more of this curious substance. 

Kehoe, in her report, found multiple, natural gas fields across Wyoming where helium was present as a byproduct, which suggests the right geology isn’t only confined to Sublette County. 

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.

***Update***

Alert canceled. Knudsen has been located.
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The Carissa Gold Mine at South Pass City was one of the Cowboy State’s most productive gold mines, drawing thousands of hopeful miners to South Pass City in 1867. The miners never found their mother lode, though, and the Carissa petered out within just a couple years. 

The town — which, along with the mine, is a state historic site today — remains remote and all but deserted.

But a new gold explorer has been digging around in that area, and believes the old historic strike wasn’t far off the mark, after all. The old miners just lacked the technology to go deep enough. Past that level where water starts pouring into the mine.

Canada-based Relevant Gold, founded by geologists Rob Bergmann and Brian Lentz, say they have already found several promising metal belts in Wyoming, including one near the old Carissa Mine. And, unlike those historic miners, they do not lack the technology to go after it. 

They are gearing up for what they believe is going to be a transformational summer this year in Wyoming.

“When you look at historic mining projects, the reason they shut down is always economic,” Bergmann, Relevant Gold co-founder and CEO, told Cowboy State Daily. “That doesn’t mean the resource has necessarily run out, though. And that’s exactly what we see in South Pass.”

The Abitibi What?

The data Relevant Gold has collected includes both drilling samples, as well as new magnetic surveys, performed in partnership with Wyoming Geological Survey and U.S. Geological Survey. But it also includes historical geological information, which University of Wyoming scientists have known about for a while. 

In fact, it was that research that led Bergmann to think that the area that is today Wyoming has been sitting on an immense gold belt deep below the surface of the earth. Maybe even Abitibi gold belt immense — a formation that spans Ontario and Quebec and is well-known in mining circles for producing tremendous amounts of gold. 

The Abitibi belt formed between 2.6 to 2.8 billion years ago, a timeframe geologist have linked to volcanic activity that led to precious metal deposits like silver, gold, copper and nickel. The extension of the Abitibi formation into Wyoming was documented by University of Wyoming researcher Kevin Chamberlain. 

“His work is one of the reasons we were so attracted to Wyoming,” Bergmann said. “He has published the science showing there’s this connection to these old rocks from Canada in Wyoming.”

Other Gold Belts Exist

The Carissa Mine area isn’t the only place in Wyoming that Relevant Gold is exploring. In fact, this summer, the company plans to drill at its Bradley Peak project, which is located in the Seminoe Mountains near Rawlins.

“There was historic mining there, similar to South Pass City, and it’s never been drilled before,” Bergmann said. “We are the first to go test the rocks below the surface, to see if there are opportunities there to unlock value.”

Bergmann said the company will also be looking at several other areas throughout Wyoming, to find and flag the areas where it believes there’s the highest potential. 

“We will put it through our systematic exploration process,” he said. “We start by looking at all the data to analyze an area, and then we’ll put a plan together for boots on the ground.”

Bergmann said he and his partner, Lentz, have built a number of successful companies in the natural resource space, including one called Big Rock Exploration. 

The success of that company allowed the duo to capitalize this new venture, Relevant Gold, in 2020, with a mission focused on following Canada’s Abitibi formation in Wyoming to map out its metal belts. 

So far, they believe they’ve identified five, large-scale projects in Wyoming. 

CK Project Near Cheyenne Still Going

While Relevant Gold’s headquarters is in Vancouver, Canada, the company does have a field office in Riverton, Wyoming, as well as an operational office in Minnesota. They listed on the Canadian exchange starting out because that venue is friendlier to a more speculative enterprise like a gold prospecting company.

Relevant Gold has been gaining steam, lately, though, with the data its team has put together on likely gold belts in Wyoming. That data attracted some high-powered investors, Bergmann said. 

Among them is major gold producer Kinross Gold Corp., which has purchased a significant number of shares in the company, as well as prominent mining industry figure, William G. Bollinger, who has also placed a significant, multi-million dollar bet on the future of Relevant Gold.

Bollinger, in a news release about his investment, said he believes Relevant Gold is on the cusp of a huge gold breakthrough, a breakthrough that’s happening in Wyoming.

“This substantial common share purchase is a mark of my confidence in this talented team and the highly prospective potential of this under explored and untapped resource,” he said in the statement.

Relevant Gold is now the second gold prospector to land in Wyoming. The other project, CK Gold Project, is located near Cheyenne at the site of the historic Copper King Mine, developed in 1881, in Wyoming’s Silver Crown Mining District. 

That project ceased mining just before World War II, but mineable quantities of gold, copper, and other metals remain in the area. 

That project is still underway, Cowboy State Daily has confirmed with the company that owns it, U.S. Gold Corp. They just released a study in January, exploring feasibility of the mine, and expect to begin production in 2027.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.