Arabic version: استئناف استخراج الهيليوم في أستراليا بشبه جزيرة يورك

According to ABC News, helium has been extracted in Australia for the first time in three years after Gold Hydrogen carried out testing at its Ramsay 1 site outside Port Vincent on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula. The company extracted the gas over the weekend, marking the first helium capture in the country since Darwin’s production plant closed in 2023.

The closure of Santos’s Darwin LNG plant, which exhausted its feedstock, ended Australian helium production. It had been the only production plant in the Southern Hemisphere. Gold Hydrogen chief executive Neil McDonald said helium’s importance extended beyond balloons, noting that MRIs cannot operate without it and that the gas is used in making mobile phones, electronics and computers. He also said submarines require helium.

Australia’s renewed extraction effort comes during a global helium shortage. About a third of the world’s supply was taken out after Iranian missile strikes hit Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas plant in March. Mr McDonald said some countries had stopped exporting helium, while demand was growing. Helium is the second-lightest gas in the world and, once extracted from underground, floats into the atmosphere and cannot be recovered.

Gold Hydrogen aims to have a commercially available supply within 18 months. Further testing is under way at the Yorke Peninsula site to assess gas volumes and how easily it can be extracted, with the results to inform potential commercial pilot projects. The company’s exploratory Ramsay Project covers a 75,000-square-kilometre tenement where natural hydrogen was first discovered in the 1920s and 1930s. Local landholder Brendan Moloney welcomed the project, saying it could create employment, provided fracking was not involved.