Sask. helium drilling could yield new prospects for struggling oilpatch

A maestro of Canada’s bum oilpatch is anticipating a new product drawn from low underneath Saskatchewan grain fields will yield a healthy apparatus bang for Western Canada.

Marlon McDougall, 59, says he wasn’t meddlesome when initial approached final year to join a youth scrutiny company.

After 35 years in a oil and gas industry, he had grown undone by a augmenting headaches, including environmental criticism, tube constraints, regulatory burdens and a need to adopt costly new technologies as easy-to-produce pools of oil and gas are depleted.

But New York-based financial manager Nick Snyder, 36, owner and authority of secretly hold North American Helium, positive him nothing of those problems exist with helium, a lighter-than-air product he skeleton to furnish and export.

The rush to get in on a new apparatus attention recalls a fad of a oil and gas zone in a ’80s, McDougall, named boss and arch handling officer final spring, pronounced in an talk from a company’s medium downtown Calgary offices.

“You do things right,” he said. “You have an idea, we constraint land, we fire seismic, we go out and cavalcade scrutiny wells, we make discoveries and it only rolls on from there.”

Helium, a second many abundant component in a universe, is in brief supply on Earth.

Demand for a gas once used especially for military, continue and celebration balloons has been usually rising, formulating shortages and spiking prices in new years.

Helium’s singular ability to sojourn a glass during intensely low temperatures creates it a cooling representative of choice for superconducting magnets in investigate and medicine (including MRIs).

It’s also essential in rocketry and plasma welding.

The tellurian marketplace for helium, meanwhile, is being thrown far-reaching open by a U.S. government’s preference 5 years ago to gradually sell off a vital pot of a dead gas and spin a marketplace it now heavily influences over to a private zone by 2021.

The sourroundings is developed for a resurgence of a attention in Saskatchewan, that constructed helium from wells for about a decade 50 years ago before foundering due to slumping prices, pronounced Melinda Yurkowski, partner arch geologist for a Saskatchewan Geological Survey.

“It’s still a lot of arrange scrutiny right now,” she said, adding no one knows how many helium — produced by a spoil of hot uranium and thorium — the range contains.

Virginia-based Weil Group Resources reactivated dual bequest helium wells in 2016 and built a 40-million-cubic-feet-per-year, $10-million helium subdivision trickery during Mankota in a southwest dilemma of a province.

Helium was trucked to Weil’s liquefaction comforts in a U.S. and sole until a wells were dangling due to prolongation problems in mid-2019. Weil has given drilled a new good to try to revive output.

The association has skeleton to furnish helium in Alberta as good and is deliberation eventually building a liquefaction trickery there to super-cool a gas to glass form so it can be shipped in high-pressure tanks anywhere in a world, Weil CEO Jeff Vogt said.

Western Canada has an advantage over other new sources of helium in that a best pot are found in pools done adult of 95 per cent nitrogen, pronounced Scott Mundle, an partner highbrow and researcher during a University of Windsor in Ontario who has been study samples from helium explorers.

The nitrogen found can be safely vented to a atmosphere after a one-to-two per cent helium calm is removed, since a Earth’s atmosphere is done adult of about 78 per cent nitrogen, he said.

Trace amounts of methane and CO dioxide can also be expelled with minimal impact on a environment, he added.

The intensely high vigour in reservoirs deeper than dual kilometres underneath a aspect means wells can be prolific for years before being depleted, pronounced Mundle, outlasting shallower pools elsewhere in a world.

North American Helium is a many active of a handful of companies that have staked out a sum of 1.7 million hectares of helium leases and permits in Saskatchewan.

It has drilled 13 new helium wells in southwestern Saskatchewan, with 11 deliberate commercially viable, and has indeterminate skeleton to open a plant to routine gas from a singular good by mid-2020.

Moving brazen with prolongation will count on signing long-term supply contracts with buyers, who will many expected be from among a large industrial gas suppliers who now control tellurian distribution, McDougall said.

The intensity is huge, Snyder said. North American Helium’s five-year devise includes wells, subdivision plants and liquefaction comforts to supply a estimable cube of tellurian direct now pegged during about 7 billion cubic feet per year.

“We consider internally a reasonable expectancy is that as a (American) fields decrease … providing about 10 per cent of tellurian supply — 700 million cubic feet per year — is really many a honeyed mark in terms of being practicable and collateral fit with a land bottom we have.”

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/sask-helium-drilling-oilpatch-1.5415930?cmp=rss