The growing importance of the rare and little-known Helium-3 gas has been shown in new commercial deals signed in the United States.
Elevated levels of Helium-3 were found in Gold Hydrogen’s most recent testing for natural hydrogen and helium at its South Australia tenement, sparking questions about how significant that could be, particularly when one US company has announced it was going to the moon to harvest the gas.
Now that company, Interlune, has announced its first commercial customer. Maybell Quantum, for Helium-3. The quantum infrastructure company has agreed to purchase thousands of litres of Helium-3 for yearly delivery from 2029 to 2035.
The Helium-3 will be used in Maybell’s state-of-the-art dilution refrigerators, which cool quantum devices to near-absolute zero temperatures. Interlune also announced a purchase agreement with the US Department of Energy Isotope Program.
Interlune said on its website: ‘‘To create, maintain, and manipulate the fragile quantum states necessary for quantum computing, ‘qubits,’ the fundamental unit of information in a quantum computer, must be cooled to temperatures hundreds of times colder than outer space. As quantum computing systems scale, individual systems will grow, needing hundreds or even thousands of litres of Helium-3.’’
Interlune is working on novel technologies for excavating, sorting, extracting, and separating lunar soil or regolith to produce industrial quantities of Helium-3. It is also developing ways to separate Helium-3 from domestic helium supplies using extremely cold temperatures. It was raised US$18 million in venture capital.
Gold Hydrogen is watching the developments closely, ahead of its next round of drilling, which will test for both hydrogen and helium at new sites, in Q4.
Interlune latest here.
Meanwhile, another quantum computing company talking up its need for Helium-3 is French company Alice & Bob, details here.