Speaking on the Helium: A Year of Change webinar, Wood discussed Noble Helium’s helium explorations in the Rift Basins of Tanzania, which the company believes to be the best untested helium play on the planet.
“Global Helium formed four years ago, we have very significant landholding or acreage holding in the Rift Basins of Tanzania. We believe, and we’ve scoured the world to understand, that this is a truly unique geology, and we think that this could be one of the world’s best untested helium generation systems,” Wood explained when in conversation with gasworld TV.
“We’ve put a team together. We’ve got a global team anchored by some pretty high-profile investor, and we are in the process of right now of raising capital to move forward with our drilling program in Tanzania. We’ve done our foundation exploration work, we know what we’re dealing with across the entire basin, and now we’re moving forward to hopefully drilling next year.”
Whilst Noble Helium is clearly powering on with its exploration and is very confident with what they are going to discover, gasworld TV asked Wood about some of the suspicion towards new actors or stakeholders in the industry.
Responding to such question, Wood, said, “Certainly there’s different styles of companies with various levels of expertise in what they’re doing. In the public markets, particularly, you get to see opportunists, and then there are some people with credibility who are working on a basis of integrity. From a Noble Helium perspective, we pride ourselves on that integrity.”
“Suspicion is normal,” he continued. “I guess we are exploring and there are no guarantees in exploration. You do your best work and the rest of it is up to Mother Nature to a certain extent.”
“We as Noble Helium have engaged with leveraging 20 plus years of experience in the East Africa itself to be exploring where we are, and we think we put ourselves, with the benefit of that experience, in the parts of the basin with the highest probability of success.”
Reverting back to the title of the webinar, Helium: A Year of Change, Wood then shared his thoughts on the change for the helium market, and why he believed that the market needs such change.
“I think it’s inevitable, this change was casted 30 years ago. The transition away from a US Federal Reserve and a way towards other suppliers of helium that happen to be in other parts of the world. It was inevitable with the policy settings in the US, that’s the way it is,” he explained.
“There’s no question that there’s going to be plenty of helium available over the next decade, which is excellent. The demand for helium is going up, and we think Tanzania offers a very significant opportunity to provide that diversity supply.”