Gold Hydrogen returns to Resources Rising Stars with powerful backing from major Japanese investors, including Toyota Motor Corporation and Mitsubishi Gas Chemical, which collectively invested AUD 14.5 million in the company at a significant premium to market. Please welcome Managing Director Neil McDonald.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you to Resources Rising Stars for allowing the opportunity to present to you and for you being in the room today. Neil McDonald, I'm the Managing Director and Founder of Gold Hydrogen, and we are a dedicated company that's the first to drill in Australia and explore for naturally occurring hydrogen, but also helium that is in the ground from a non-fossil fuel background. It's quite exciting. That's the usual disclaimer. As mentioned, there was natural hydrogen found close to 100 years ago, and that was drilled by the state and syndicates. They were looking for oil and gas in the oil boom, but they didn't find any. But they found up to 90% purity for hydrogen. We came across the information and acquired significant permits totaling approximately 77,000 sq km.
And we drilled beside the historical occurrences and found up to 95% purity for natural hydrogen. But we also discovered helium at the highest purities in the world at 36.9%, which I'll take you through. But this success created enormous international interest from global energy companies. We ran a process last year into this year, and Toyota Motor Corporation, Mitsubishi Gas Chemical, and ENEOS Xplora were selected to be strategic investors into our company after much due diligence that the Japanese do in our selection process at a 22% premium to the share price. As I said, natural hydrogen was discovered here close to 100 years ago. Based on historical information and our drilling that we have also done, we have independent resource reports at 1.3 billion kg. That's a mean middle average. And that is only over an area of approximately one-third of that dark green permit.
As I said, in total, we have close to 77,000 sq km of prospective acreage and permit areas close to infrastructure, ports, and the like. That is why we've been getting international interest. In our program, the first program, we confirmed the hydrogen there at world-class levels and the helium there at the highest reported levels ever in history at 36, but also helium-3. Countries are spending billions of dollars to go to the moon to find helium-3, and I'll explain to you why it's so important in the future and why it's so valuable. We're working with CSIRO, SLB, international world leaders. You'll see on the map there the positions we have. It's got scale, infrastructure, and future upside. We are currently drilling. We are drilling 2-3 wells as we speak, and we'll be looking to do extended testing of those wells February onwards next year.
What we do know is, as I said, there's an enormous amount of hydrogen and helium there. We drilled exploration wells, confirming those record numbers. We're currently drilling in more optimal locations following our 570 2D seismic line-kilometer survey. We are drilling what we know is it's there and it comes to surface and it's good purities. We have designed larger well holes, 8-inch holes instead of 4-inch exploration holes. We have technical people from around the world that understand this better than anybody else. We are optimizing extraction of the gases to surface. We believe on historical data that the helium is close to commercial already and the hydrogen is on its way. This is why Mitsubishi Gas, Toyota, and ENEOS have invested with us.
One of the reasons you've heard about man-made hydrogen or factory hydrogen, that is where you've got to mine the materials to make solar panels or wind turbines, erect them across vast tracts of land. Then you've got to build hydrolysis equipment, find water, which is a valuable resource. That costs hundreds of millions of dollars before you make 1 kg . It's approximately 1 kg of man-made factory hydrogen is AUD 6 to make before transportation. Natural hydrogen is AUD 1/kg before transportation. This will have an enormous commercial advantage over other hydrogen producers. Mali in Africa, M-A-L-I, have been drilling and producing natural hydrogen for over 10 years now. They are powering the town with hydrogen. Admittedly, it's a small town, but it works, and their information is AUD 1/kg . We know how much it costs to drill these wells. We're quite confident with this.
There's an enormous movement, as you know, politically and environmentally, to go to a decarbonization or reducing emissions. Some countries are doing it a little bit bullish than others. Some are doing it probably foolish than others. But Japan and our other partners are doing it sensible to be part of the energy mix. And hydrogen has been defined as part of the future energy mix. But hydrogen's not only used for energy, it's used for other purposes as well. Helium, it's not just party balloons and squeaky voices. There's multiple uses. It's valuable. It's rare. It's not produced in Australia anymore. Medical technology and imaging, MRIs, space, defense needs helium as cooling agents. Nuclear warships need it. Defense and other purposes need it. It is growing, but the hugest demand is coming from data centers and AI to make computer chips and cooling agents for the data centers.
It sells for approximately $400-$500 per 1,000 cu ft . We have the world's highest purities. We are very confident about moving the helium towards commercial development. To give you an example of the investors around the world that are looking for natural hydrogen helium, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, two of the wealthiest companies in the world, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into an American company called Koloma, specifically because they know that what natural hydrogen and helium can help with, not only decarbonization, but economic global expansion and AI and data centers. Helium-3 is only made by degrading nuclear warheads every 12 and a half years. It produces helium-3. It's one proton, less than helium-4. Countries are spending billions of dollars to go to the moon. Why? It is the ultimate best cooling agent in the world.
It will be the key to economic global domination for nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion will require 100 kg a day of helium-3. It is found on land and terrestrial, but mainly in places where you cannot find it to explore for it or extract it or in sovereign risk countries. We have found it in elevated levels. We need to do more work on it, but your 4 kg gas barbecue bottle at home full of helium-3 is worth AUD 72 million. That is very valuable, and it's in really scarce quantities and huge demand. We are excited by the potential of this. There are technology companies out that allow you to separate it and bottle it. More work to be done, though. We know it's there, but we have to do a lot more. We knew that the hydrogen and helium is regionally across all our permits.
That's our current permit where we're drilling. Those circles confirm hydrogen and helium has been existed. We've done the tests. We've done the fluid inclusions. We know it's regional, not just in a couple of wells. Again, we have found 95.8% purity. But this last program that we announced on Tuesday, we're already getting reports back at 97%. The drilling results today show that we've got multiple zones of natural hydrogen in the data. It's porosity. There's permeability. There's natural pressure. There's also helium. The helium is in a 200 m thick helium zone from 600 m- 800 m . It is quite data, and we're very optimistic by the data. You can see there, those are our first drilling results of Ramsay 1 and 2. You can see the hydrogen and helium spikes. In brackets, in that box in C, that's a thick helium zone, really thick, 200 m.
You can see the hydrogen spikes that are prolific down the well. We look forward to drilling further wells and testing these to move towards commercial opportunities for development optimization. This was our testing program on the first wells. We got gas to surface. This is the hydrogen, natural hydrogen. We had a short period of time to test it with our government approvals. We used a 180 barrel-a-day pump to dewater the formation to liberate the gas. This time around, with our engineering, we're using a 20,000 barrell-a-day pump. We expect to make that graph exponentially go up with the time we have and the equipment and engineering we have. The same with the helium. We got helium to surface. These are great results for anybody and for Gold Hydrogen. Again, through a 180 barrel-a-day pump, you can see the rates and the quantities increasing.
We believe we're on the way to commercialization opportunities, and that's why the Japanese have also invested. This is our drilling program, the seismic program on the left where the lines are, Ramsay 1 and 2, and we just drilled Ramsay 3, and we're drilling Ramsay 4 today. As I said, we want to move this towards development opportunities. The natural hydrogen to fuel cells to electricity. The natural hydrogen for Mitsubishi Gas to be able to use it for green methanol. Now, methanol's been around for a long time. The bain-maries in the auditorium for lunch and afternoon tea. That's methanol. Creates no smoke, no emissions. Like hydrogen, creates no emissions, just mist and water. Green methanol is where you use bio-organic waste, plant-based materials, wood chips.
Our peninsula where we operate on in that whole area has enormous amounts of wheat heads that either get burned or are given away. We can use all that material with the natural hydrogen to form green methanol and use it domestically, but also Mitsubishi Gas can export it. We're working on these systems, and that's part of what I was talking about. The electricity, the green methanol, and the hydrogen to pipelines. There's also fertilizer. There's multiple opportunities, not just energy. To recap, we are working with these parties. I'll just go back one to the helium where it was before. BOC, Linde, Air Liquide. We're working with all these global parties. A helium project for early commercial production. There's none produced in Australia, no helium produced.
We can do it for approximately AUD 12 or AUD 13 million to create early scale sales, and they can do that for us. Same with the Japanese with the hydrogen and the green methanol. So to recap, we have world-leading results. We have great strategic investors that are always loyal and keep going with you. We're drilling now, and the data is looking as good or better than our previous results. We're looking to optimize the extraction to surface. We have great opportunities with the helium and helium-3 because it's extremely valuable. And we have ready-made opportunities. Our management team there are very experienced, focusing on natural hydrogen and helium. They have also worked in the gas industry for some of them up to 30-40 years. We have experienced people. Some of my team there, Simon's just moved to us. He has worked on two green methanol projects.
Maersk Shipping is buying a green methanol project as we speak, converting ships from bunker-fueled diesel to green methanol. You'll see that transformation. That is why they're buying projects or wanting green methanol. My board, Alexander Downer, very well-respected former Foreign Minister for Australia, well-respected internationally when we're running global processes. Kate Barnet, very experienced financial services. Roger and Karl have been in this industry for an extremely long time. I've had my booth. Please feel free to come up to me. We look forward to producing ongoing great results. Thank you for your time today, and thank you for Resources Rising Stars.