South Africa's hidden helium

South Africa, once the world's largest gold producer, has unearthed a new treasure hidden beneath its feet – helium.

Widely known for birthday balloons and squeaky voices, helium also plays a vital role in medical scanners, superconductors and space travel.

Helium is often treated as a waste product in natural gas wells and is produced in only a handful of countries across the globe.

Business associates Stefano Marani and Nick Mitchell had natural gas at the centre of their business, Renergen, when they purchased an 87,000 hectare piece of land in 2012 for just $1. Yet once the gas had been examined, they realised they'd hit the jackpot.

Stefano Marani was over the moon.

Stefano Marani: ("What was your reaction when you found out?") - "I can't say that on camera!" [laughter]

On top of the discovery of helium itself, the concentration of the gas in the samples was remarkably high. This was subsequently found to be unmatched anywhere in the world.

Stefano Marani: "The United States produces at around 0.35 percent. Our average is 3.4 percent, so already we're, we’re 10 times higher than the United States and that's our average. We have wells over here at 12 percent, which are completely unprecedented and never seen before."

Renergen calculates there's potentially 9.74 billion cubic metres of helium, which, if correct, surpasses the United States’ total store and would be worth above $100 billion. It promises to be the cleanest production environmentally too since it doesn't require fracking, a process involving high pressure liquid jets breaking up the rock. Instead, helium is simply released as engineers drill.

Stefano Marani: "It’s, it’s stimulating from a science, from a chemistry perspective, from a physics perspective, from an engineering perspective. There’s all of these cool things going on. And then overlaid with the physics and the chemistry, you’ve got logistics and you’ve got, you know, the fact that we’re dual-listed on, you know, on, on two stock exchanges. There’s, there’s a lot going on in this project. And there, there are a lot of layers to peel away on it. But it, it’s, it’s a fantastic job, it really is." Weniger anzeigen