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As the hum of the drilling rig’s diesel engine echoed through the drilling site, Terigi returned to his mobile laboratory, a dusty suitcase full of microscopes and rock samples.Checking the data on the computer, he saw what he had been waiting for since arriving in Ruqua: the gas spectrometer detected the peak helium content in the rock drilling pass through. This is the so-called “gas show”. Trij kicked the hatch open and walked to the oil pit, where the mud pumped from the drill face was gathering. It bubbling like a jacuzzi.
“It’s here,” he said to himself. “Helium is coming!”
Terigi took a video of bubbling mud with his mobile phone and excitedly sent messages to his colleagues in the camp. After smoking another cigarette, he chatted with the drill team; no one had seen anything like this before. They believe they have discovered the world’s first major “green” helium deposit, and the first considerable helium deposit since 1967.
Until 2 AM, the bubbles continued to surface because the drill had drilled another 30 feet. Then, suddenly, it lost all torque. The engine went from a low hum to a high hum. The driller watched, at a loss.
The drill bit—a 6-inch thick stainless steel and tungsten spiral—is connected to the motor by a series of steel tubes that are twisted together to form a so-called rope. A joint on the rope has been cut off. The team had no choice but to pull it out of the hole, leaving the 300-foot-long pipe and drill bit still there.
When the sun rose, Helium One CEO David Minchin woke up at the camp. Without realizing the frustration, he saw Terigi’s helium data on the computer screen and immediately thought, This will be the best day of my lifeHe put on his pants, jumped out of the tent, and happily shouted: “Good morning!” to Randy Donald, the drilling site supervisor.
“Have you never heard of it?” Donald said.
“What did you hear?” Min Yonqi replied.
“That’s not good. It’s really not good.”
In the 1950s, A geologist named TC James traveled extensively in the area now known as Tanzania. As the chief mining geologist of the British Tanganyika Geological Survey, his job is to better understand the country’s mineral resources. geology By identifying things like arable land and mineral deposits. During one of the trips, James sampled a gas-bearing hot spring near the small village of Itumbula in the Ruqua Basin, which has attracted locals for centuries.
James’ discovery told him that these gases are extremely rich in helium, but he didn’t care about it. At the time, helium was easily available. The National Helium Reserve is a huge geological helium storage unit created by the US government in 1925 by recovering helium from gas fields in the Texas Panhandle, and it is approaching its peak. Since billions of cubic feet of crude helium are stored and the demand for it is still immature, there is no reason to extract natural gas in remote areas that lack the basic infrastructure (roads, electricity, running water) needed for development projects.
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