Gold Hydrogen Managing Director Neil McDonald joins me now to discuss the progress of its exploration of natural hydrogen and helium at the Ramsay Project and the significance of the hydrogen purities. Neil, good to see you again.
Yeah, good morning, Jonathan. Good to see you.
Now, you've recorded hydrogen purities of up to 98.5% in phase I exploration well testing. Can you talk us through the testing and what the results mean?
Yeah, so we've been doing our exploration well testing, and it's been really exciting and promising to not only see the really high purity in the hydrogen, but also that we're seeing it to surface from shallow zones to begin with. And then we're also seeing quite good helium results as well, which you no doubt we can talk about more.
Let's do that. Let's go through those hydrogen and helium purity levels. Can you talk us through what they are, what they mean for you?
Yeah, certainly. So to get 95.8% purity for hydrogen and 20%-25% confirmed laboratory testing also for helium in a non-petroleum system is a world first. There is nothing like it ever seen. And to get those results is incredible to be able to do that, you know, from a project in South Australia, the Ramsay Block. We're quite confident that both the hydrogen and the helium are extensive over our permit, and we've got historical data reflecting that. And, you know, Jonathan, we've also been able to quite recently do a very 2D seismic program, 600km . And that early data is indicating that we do have a regional play across our 7,500 sq km permit. So it's quite exciting that we've got great results to date.
We know that there's other locations and probably better locations for our next drilling program next year or later this year.
I also want to talk about the dewatering process. How does that contribute to exploration efforts, and what are the expected outcomes of that?
Yeah, so look, it's not unusual to have what we call formation water. It's not an aquifer in our exploration areas. And there's not water everywhere across our permits. They're isolated sort of formation spots, very historical water with quite high salinity, which is very interesting because there's a lot of scientific papers saying that you need the high salinity water to react with the iron-rich rocks to create the hydrolysis. So we are seeing some great results from the dewatering and getting a good understanding of it and learning how this system works. Like nobody in the world is actually doing what we're doing with both natural hydrogen and helium. So these results are great, and they're very good data to get.
So let's go back to helium. 180m thick helium pay zone identified in Stage 1. Can you talk me through the potential of that and what it does for commercial extraction?
Yeah, so it's very exciting. So it's, as we said, a 180m thick pay zone, and we've tested that in like multiple spots in that 180m to work that out. And we are getting those extremely high purities as, you know, 20%-25%. So we believe it's extensive and a prolific system, and it's looking very promising to be not only commercial for the future, but commercial short term. There's no production of helium in Australia anymore. That finished in November last year, the Bayu-Undan project in Northern Territory. So Australia has a large helium requirement of usage, and we're hoping in the next 12 months or so to be able to start putting, you know, our domestic helium into the market, apart from, you know, eventually exporting, but yes.
Neil, we've spoken a few times over this last quarter. You've ended up with AUD 15.6 million end of quarter funds in the bank. How are you going to use those funds now moving forward? What are the exploration and development plans?
Yeah, thank you. So we do have a good pool of reserves here, plus we have some other research and development credits owing to us later this year. So we're sitting down strategy-wise, we're looking at that 2D seismic, and we're identifying that as a pretty extensive area. So we wish to drill another two to three wells end of the year or early next year, and then do further drilling programs later next year to keep proving up the area, advancing it towards the pilot projects and the proof of concept. We would still like to put natural hydrogen from the ground into a fuel cell to convert to electricity to show the world. That's how it's done. It's been done in Mali in Africa for over a decade.
We'd like to show, like, Mali is you can do natural hydrogen for a dollar a kilogram production or less. I know man-made hydrogen is a bit of talk about that at the moment on its economics. It'll be needed, no problem, but their economics is AUD 6/kg before production. And so if natural hydrogen like our project and Bill Gates funded project in America can start, you know, filling that gap of lower cost hydrogen, it's a wonderful outcome for the world. And that's what we're looking to achieve as we keep moving on, Jonathan.
Certainly as we've spoken about before, you've got the support there as well to be able to try and achieve this.
Yes, we do. It's wonderful. You know, Australia is supporting, you know, the move to net zero. Hydrogen will be part of that framework, natural hydrogen. If we keep achieving these results, you know, we're quite confident that we'll be a big part of providing, you know, lower cost production hydrogen, you know, stable energy and clean energy. That's the aim, and the helium, it's a wonderful add-on to our project. It's quite amazing to have up there the world's best purities, which also means that that's going to be a low cost helium production project. We believe for our pilot, we wish to produce that. We think it will be very low cost.
To have both, you know, 1.3 billion kg , best estimate for natural hydrogen, you know, 41 BCF of helium, just a small portion of that block, we're quite excited to move forward and keep moving it forward for our shareholders.
Neil, plenty of news to come before the end of the year, and we'll speak again soon, I'm sure.
Yeah, no, thank you very much, Jonathan. Have a wonderful day there.