Two years after massive discovery on Iron Range, Minnesota's helium industry is ballooning
Things are looking up for Minnesota's nascent helium industry, because miners keep going down to find more of it.
Nearly two years after first making the discovery with its Jetstream 1 well, engineers at Pulsar Helium are underway drilling Jetstream 3 more than a half-mile away — and there are potential plans for a dozen more.
"We anticipate going to up to Jetstream 16 to determine where the limits of this reservoir is," Steve Campbell, Pulsar's operations manager, explained to WCCO. "We're looking at multiple years, and a lot of the wells we can't drill until we're in a frozen condition because we're in wetlands."
Helium is a $3 billion industry, and blimps and balloons aren't the markets inflating that price. It's used in rockets, aerospace, semiconductors, welding and MRI machines.
According to Pulsar, the helium concentration found nearly 5,000 feet underground in Babbitt was measured at 12.4%, which is higher than forecasted and roughly 30 times the industry standard for commercial helium.
"This work is going to tell us how big a commercial play this could be," Campbell added.
The U.S. had long been a major supplier of helium, but most commercial helium today is imported from countries like Russia, Qatar and Tanzania, which is why a helium mine right smack dab in the middle of the country could be a gold mine in the Iron Range.
"We are holding onto hope," Babbitt Mayor Andrea Zupancich told WCCO. "It's definitely worth the wait and we are doing our best to hold on to be able to wait."
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has no regulations for mining gas, but state lawmakers recently passed a bill to change that; creating those rules and how to enforce them could also take a few years.