Highlights:
- Interim Test Update – Successful exploration well testing operations, which are pioneering for both Natural Hydrogen and Helium in a non-petroleum system, are nearing completion at the site of the Company’s successful Ramsay 1 and Ramsay 2 exploration wells. Operations have now been suspended to provide the crews with a mandatory work break, and will resume after Easter.
- Testing Objectives – to obtain samples of both Natural Hydrogen and Helium for specialist composition and isotopic analysis in world-leading laboratories and to extract both Natural Hydrogen and Helium to surface. Both have been achieved.
- World Leading Helium Purity Levels – Testing and analysis to date following the drilling of both Ramsay 1 and Ramsay 2 confirms up to 17.5% purity for Helium in the MDT sample taken from the Ramsay 2 well, on an air-corrected basis. This provides clarification of the results disclosed by the Company in its 6 and 19 December 2023 ASX releases. These results are believed to be amongst the highest ever recorded purities for Helium in the world.
- Permeable Formation – Results demonstrate that the formation is permeable and producing fluids and gas from all of the formations tested to date, and has produced both Natural Hydrogen Helium to the surface. Permeability and ability to flow gas to surface was one of the key objectives of testing, and a significant derisking milestone for the Company.
- Next stage of Testing – based on these promising results it is now appropriate to conduct a longer term extended exploration production test to understand how future wells will perform during the production phase of the project. Stage 2 testing will concentrate on producing the well (via a down hole pump or other process to remove the formation fluid) while monitoring gas rates at surface. This information will then feed into the design of a future proof-of-concept Natural Hydrogen and Helium pilot plant.