Oil and Gas Startups Podcast

0:00 This podcast is brought to you by Ironsight. The logistical complexity of oil and gas field operations can make a difficult stay on top of who is doing what, where, and when. That's where

0:10 Ironsight comes in. And so Ironsight connects ENPs, mid-stream companies, and service providers so they can collaborate and coordinate with the field services and internal resources more

0:20 efficiently. Ironsight was designed to support everything from fluid hauling and hot shots to maintenance and trades, making it one of the most versatile field operations and logistics management

0:30 tools on the market How do they do it? Well, the secret sauce is, regardless of what type of service, every single job you need done is going to follow the same core workflow. Some of the

0:37 requests to job. It gets scheduled, the job gets executed, what gets done is documented and it's reviewed, approved, and the data and the documentation gets sent wherever it needs to go, kind of

0:46 from there. So Ironsight has spent years perfecting their fit for purpose function, making their core workflow configurable any field activity so that you can lower operating costs, reduce your

0:55 risk, and be more effective across your entire field operation. So whether we're for an EP, Midsroom company, your service provider, if you're managing field operations and logistics, you're

1:03 going to want to take a look at Ironsight. They were also the Energy Tech Night in Midland winner a few years back. They've also been on the podcast in the past, good friends of ours, so go check

1:11 them out. It's at ironsightappdw,

1:14 so learn if your company is eligible for a free three month trial. It's ironsight, S-I-G-H-Tappdw Click the link in the description and let them know that we sent you. What's going on, Digital

1:25 Wildcatters? Welcome to another episode of Oil and Gas Startups Podcasts. Got a really interesting topic this week. We are talking about helium, and there's probably a lot of people that are

1:35 listening that are familiar with helium. Everybody's first thought to sleep, but sucking the helium out of balloons, making your voice really high But There's actually a ton of scientific and

1:48 engineering applications for helium and the oil and gas and natural resources industry plays a big role in this. So today we have Robert Price, the CEO of Total Helium in the studio today, down

1:59 here from Denver. Yeah. I asked Robert, I said, Did you come in town for OTC? He said, No, I just came in town for this podcast. Y'all are that special. So I appreciate you coming down here,

2:08 man. Well, let me say it's a pleasure to be here And as I shared with you, a lot of our team members are big bands of you, being in the oil and gas business for many decades, and the younger

2:20 generation that's coming in, they love you. And when they said, You got to go on this podcast, you got to, so it's an honor to be here. It's an honor to be here. I appreciate you taking the

2:31 time to come tell your story and talk about what you guys are working on. So first, let's talk about total helium, just at a high level low review. What is it? I'd say it's a healing on EMP. You

2:44 take it from there. Yeah, thanks Colin. So I funded Total Helium about three years ago. We acquired oil and gas leases in Kansas. And because of my limited funding of acquiring over 50, 60, 70,

3:02 000 acres in Kansas and our concept was to drill wells, a dewatering process where we bring the pressure down and the gas expands.

3:14 The Hugueten Basin has been the epicenter of helium production for the last 100 years. Much of the world's supply of helium has come from the Hugueten, so we went where the helium was. And as we

3:26 did this process, we discovered helium, but the quantity of helium was about a six-tenths of a percent. So in order for you to produce a lot, you need a lot of quantity to have that that's 06

3:42 really.

3:48 profitable. I wrote this Twitter thread a while back talking about helium because we've been in a helium shortage for, I don't even know how many years, but the issue and if I'm off base here, if

4:00 I'm wrong, I'm not an expert when it comes to helium production, but from my understanding is that helium production for the most part has kind of been a byproduct of natural gas production, you

4:15 know, pioneer natural resources used to be a pretty big producer of helium and some of their assets. And, you know, at Jake mentioned, when people think of helium, they think of going to the

4:27 store and everyone knows you go to the store and you can't get balloons filled recently just as a helium shortages, but there's so many applications within scientific laboratories, within

4:37 engineering and computer hardware and things of this nature You know how many companies are out there that focus on, hey, we're a helium production company. I mean, is there hundreds of them? Is

4:54 it you and a few others? What's the market? It is emerging. And the people that are exploring for it, obviously, they have oil and gas experience. So they have all these skills to be able to get

5:06 the leases, drill the wells, and produce it. Back to mention about Pioneer and other ones who were in the helium business, it is a bright byproduct, generally speaking, less than 1. So in the

5:19 Hugueton Basin, the United States government, Bureau of Land Management, they acknowledged that helium was a strategic asset back in World War I, where you could send up balloons, possibly bomb

5:34 your adversaries. And so they started the helium reserve where they stored helium And since then, Congress said hey. get out of the helium business, shut it down. So it's being shut down. So

5:48 that is a void in the overall helium markets domestically. Where's the other supplies coming from? They're coming from either Russia or Qatar. And those two supplies are geopolitically not that

6:00 positive for us here in the United States. Yeah. So along with the rest of the energy supply chain, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely So

6:10 there is a real need to have a guaranteed on-demand supply of helium. So I partnered with Lindy. Lindy is a 170 billion market cap company. They actually funded our lease acquisition and our

6:27 drilling of our wells in Kansas. And so Lindy also, we worked with them to try to find other projects And what I'm really excited about today, Colin and Jake, is just on Monday. we closed on a

6:42 major acquisition for our company, our small company, buying an asset in Arizona. So where you have in Kansas and Qatar and Russia, sometimes a tenth of 1 is the byproduct. Some people refer to

6:58 this part of Arizona, the Saudi Arabia of Helium. And a lot, go ahead. That's interesting. So there's this mass reserve of Helium and Arizona people think Well, the answer is yes, and it's

7:12 already been proven. And there's been a lot of production coming out of Arizona. There are certain geological conditions that the Helium concentrations are anywhere from five to 8. And so we just

7:25 acquired a field. We have producing assets on two wells. We have another five wells that have been drilled. Again, Lindy is our partner and Lindy helped fund the pipeline expansion.

7:41 line right now to hook up these five wells. We have another six wells that will be completing within the next month. And so we will have upward to 14 wells and we have a very aggressive drilling

7:53 program. It's more developmental drilling. I wouldn't call it the Permian type of developmental drilling, but we have blanket sands. We have other sand channels at meander, which the wells could

8:05 be a lot better than the base sands. And so it is so exciting. So there's a, there's, I want to dive into the operations of helium drilling and production here in a bit. Yeah. There's like five

8:23 questions right off the top of my head, especially about Arizona. But before we do that, let's dive into your background real quick so that we can give some people some context because, you know,

8:34 they can be listening back. All those, those guys crazy and full of shit and, you know, doesn't know anything about drilling wells, but I mean, you have a long tenured history and oil and gas.

8:45 So tell us your story from the point of perception. How'd you - Yeah, I'll try to, as my eight-year-old son says when I put him to bed at night, I said, Tell me about your day. And he said, I

8:57 woke up, so I'm not gonna be that granular calling, but anyway, I grew up in Denver, Colorado, went to undergrad at University of Colorado, ended up in law school at University of Tulsa, and I

9:11 specialized in energy law. My first job at a law school, I worked at a bank. Tulsa was, we used to call ourselves the oil capital of the world. There was a lot of major oil and gas companies that

9:23 had assets and companies in Tulsa, and so I managed our trust customers' oil and gas assets. And that was really where I learned much about the oil and gas business. We had minerals, royalties,

9:35 working interests After I did that, I started up. mom and pop exploration company. We called it poor man's oil. We were drilling 2, 000

9:46 foot wells. And we were finding 100, 000 barrels here, 100, 000 barrels there. Nice. And we were able to, you know, eke out of living to the next deals. Yeah. We

9:58 then had a very ambitious project in the Williston Basin. We had 125, 000 acres. We were doing trilaterals funded by Halliburton Halliburton was our joint venture partner. This was in the mid-90s,

10:12 and we had all the leases. But with the D-Doc, the price went down to about 12 a barrel. You didn't know what to do with the leases. There was a play in the Red River called the Continental

10:24 Resources in Burlington, Conoco's predecessor. They were drilling these trilaterals before hydraulic fracking. And so we drilled three technical success wells,

10:39 And our leases expired and guess where our leases were they were at the core of the bucket We still had a little residual interest. So let me say what I've learned in life is You you make sure you

10:52 have longer-term leases and so we went to Kansas I got longer-term leases five releases right to renew for five and another five years. So you learn along the way And so but I've been in

11:05 manufacturing too. I had SNR compression Still around today. We we made well-site Compressors I sold that business to buy a manufacturing company and I supplied all afford motor companies North

11:22 American Automotive glass with our plant in Tulsa Nashville McKeeladora in war as And we had a really robust aftermarket company too, but my heart Has always been in oil and gas And even though I've

11:39 been diversified in different businesses, I had a publicly traded company called Highlands Natural Resources. We drilled two-mile laterals with the Conoco Phillips Farmout in the DJ Basin. We

11:52 actually extended the field further south than any other companies. We were funded by Private Equity, Sigler Guff. We were funded by, again, my old partner, Halliburton, that funded our

12:04 two-mile laterals. And then we ended up selling it to a family in Wyoming called the True Family. Okay. So we developed - True oil family? Yeah, true oil. I can't say better things about the

12:18 family and the company. And so, but I learned along the way. And helium I was so fascinated with. And our transaction in Arizona, we are paid 500 in MCF And if you have less than 1,

12:40 Depending on what your quantity is, it doesn't necessarily add up, but when you have 5 to 8 percent at 500 in MCF, it is very significant. And the numbers on our field in Arizona are truly

12:56 extraordinary. We're going to be able to drill up to 150 wells and again, a blanket sand well after well after well as we develop this field. As I mentioned before, Lindy funded our pipeline

13:07 expansion. We have the agreement with Lindy to sell for 500 in MCF on the first 10 wells and the market for helium right now. And there's, as you guys being in the oil and gas industry, you know,

13:20 the ebbs and flows of the prices up and down. We chose to not lock our price in for the long term because we're seeing current pricing at helium between 500 and 1, 000 an MCF. Yeah. So our

13:36 commitment is just on the on the first 10 wells. Yeah. So. These wells in Arizona, first let's talk about what the wells look like. Are these shallow, 2, 000, 3, 000 foot wells, are they

13:50 deep wells? Talk about that a little bit. So the formation we're in, it's called the Shinra. It's between 700 and 1, 200 feet deep. We've partnered with a gentleman named Brad Butler, actually

14:04 from Dallas. He has found helium in Colorado and Arizona He is truly a helium finder. Lindy put us together. We are public. Brad generally does not have partners in his companies. And so we

14:19 purchased a 50 interest in it. Brad's background is he's a driller. He has a drilling rig. So let me just back up about the whole Brook basin first of all. You have all these rocks and they

14:33 weren't deep enough to be cooked. So it's not an oil and gas basin a helium nitrogen. CO2 basin. That's what it is. And so if you try to get services and you try to get Haliburton in from, you

14:47 know, another basin to come in and cement your wells, very expensive. So what did Brad do? He has his own drilling rig. First of all, second of all, he went to an auction in Texas and bought a

14:59 submitting truck. So he has his own trenching equipment. So when Lindy funded our pipeline expansion, we're trenching it ourselves. And Brad is out there right now doing it, hooking our new wells

15:12 online. That's pretty cool. Very, very, very simple drilling. And just to share what we do, we drill down. And Brad is, again, where these wells take about two or three days. They,

15:24 depending on where they are, whether they're in the blanket sand or whether in the sand channel, the IPs can be anywhere from

15:32 150 MCF a day up to 1, 000 MCF a day. Okay. And you just do the math really quick. Take. You know, 8 of 150

15:43 MCF a day times it by 500 in MCF. These wells pay out, they cost 220, 000 in drill. They pay out in about three months. That's on the blanket set, the sand channel, which we're gonna hit

15:59 several of those, will pay out within about a month. So they love talking about the operations side of it because even if you go work in some oil and gas fields, I mean, it's hard to get trues and

16:15 service rigs and things of that nature. So I love that you talked about in Arizona. It's like, there's no infrastructure at all. The closest thing would be coming from Colorado or Bakersfield or

16:29 East New Mexico. And none of those places are necessarily close. We're economic to get equipment down there And so that presents a challenge. just from the operations and service side, then

16:42 pipeline infrastructure and things of that nature. On the pipelines, you were talking about pricing.

16:53 The natural gas market is pretty fluid and accurately priced by basin.

17:00 I imagine helium isn't as much. I bet that there's a lot more

17:07 dislocation in the market and like with these pipelines, where are you actually sending it to? Where are you doing it? So the Lindy's buying it, right? Yeah, they

17:17 are and when I first got in the helium business several years ago, I had to look up a word. It was called opaque. I said, when it's opaque meat, it means just very untransparent. You don't

17:31 really know what the market is. There's no real index for what the helium is and what they call them. these industrial gas companies, there's Lindy, Air Products, Air Liquid, a couple other two

17:44 minor ones, they control it. So they actually do long-term contracts with many of the producers. And they do not advertise what the price is. And because it's such a limited commodity, you really

17:59 don't know what the price is. And so it is a direct negotiation with the industrial gas company. Got you Back to your question before calling about the different uses of helium. Yeah. And of

18:13 course, we have a helium tank in our office with helium balloons. And when anyone of our neighbors have kids' parties or they can't get it at Party City or something else, we got the helium for it,

18:28 so. That's very cool. We embrace the balloon. It's funny, just kind of like quirky thing to give back to the community.

18:36 for the healing plug, you come out with the trench coat, it's like, how much helium do you need?

18:42 I love it. So, but the use is, you know, MRI machines need helium, cooling properties, the space program. Helium is very important from the purging element of it. And then semi-conductor

18:58 manufacturing. Yeah. If you can imagine with the chips acts, which has passed 50 billion going into bringing chip manufacturing here in the United States. So the US, and I look at it with my

19:13 background in oil and gas. I mean, what did we say back then? I'm a kid of the '70s, okay? I remember getting in line to get gas when there was an oil embargo in the Middle East. We had to do

19:26 every other day. And so it was about becoming independent from foreign and oil of supplies gas and we have achieved it as a nation.

19:36 which is incredible feat based on, you know, the working men and women of the oil and gas industry and the entrepreneurs out there. And what you guys are doing, you're getting the word out and it

19:48 really helps us become more independent. Helium is the same way. We have semiconductor manufacturers that want to build their plants here. Can you imagine them going to either Lindy or products or

20:01 someone else and say, Hey, we want to sign a long-term contract with you And you respond, Yeah, we'll sign a long-term contract. We're going to get it from Russia. They're going to go, I don't

20:13 think so. So there is a real need. You're spending these billions of dollars. You have to have that Helium, that domestic supply of Helium on demand ready to go. And so one of the initiatives

20:28 we're working on with Lindy is a 5050 partnership for a Helium storage so we can have that on demand helium. This podcast is brought to you by EnergyX. Are you tired of paying huge rates through the

20:41 big cloud providers? Are you worried about being booted off a cloud platform? If your company doesn't meet their ever shifting standards, ready to step up your data security and disaster recovery

20:50 game? Well, ladies and gentlemen, your new cloud is ready. Introducing XCloud, the scalable, resilient computing cloud that is also actually affordable. It's high performance compute for half

21:01 the cost. HPC for HTC XCloud from Red Team is opening a beta program for new cloud computing customers, and that means you, my friend. XCloud is powered by the XMDC, immersion-cooled modular data

21:14 center from EnergyX. I've seen the data center operation and it is a total game changer. So if you want more information about the beta launch, go to the URL in the description. Type in promo code

21:24 betaBETA for 50 off of your first instance. And so the URL is going to be digitalwalkcutterscomenergyx X and how do you how do you story them cuz I know with like LNG

21:37 I guess it's got to be like those little circular bulbs and obviously oil can just be in massive tanks Yeah, how do you how do you do helium? Yeah, that's such a good question Jake because helium

21:46 in hydrogen is number one element And then helium it is such a sneaky Molecule I mean it wants to get the heck out of here. It wouldn't be a product a byproduct Colin If it weren't such so so small

22:01 and it didn't kind of want to run to the atmosphere. Yeah, it's so hard to trap helium and so

22:09 The tell me your question one more time Jake. How do you story helium? How do you store it? Okay? So you know, it'll it'll literally if you have it in a tank of steel Mm-hmm. It's gonna get out

22:21 eventually it is That's how sneaky this element is because it's just super tiny molecules of ever just escaped through anything It just wants to get the heck out and so on geological time to be able

22:33 to trap it It is very difficult. I want a just share one little from a geological standpoint. There are some people that use soil samples in exploration. Personally, I haven't been a big fan of

22:46 them, but there has been some natural gas fields that have been discovered on soil sampling. So if it works with oil and gas, can you only imagine what it will do for helium? And so we have a soil

22:59 sample survey, even though we have this blanket sand, to be able to get one of those wells, one of those wells that will pay, I mean literally within months, we'll make a million dollar in

23:11 revenue in the sand channel. So what we're doing, we're drilling all these blanket wells, but we're doing

23:17 the soil sample to get in the channels to actually increase our odds and really increase the revenue. But so back to your question, Jake, about storage. So it was a traditional storage system that

23:31 the BLM had, It was very inefficient, didn't operate well, and it likes to sneak out. So what we're doing in Kansas is we're doing a desalination project

23:43 with salts to put fresh water in. And it's very,

23:48 the high integrity within this. And it's in the infrastructure where a lot of the helium plants are. So Colin, I think this was one of your questions about the pipeline and the processing. Just

24:01 real quick If you have a helium with a lot of methane and other liquids evolved in it, it's a very expensive processing plant. However, where we are, it's five to eight percent helium and the rest

24:20 is nitrogen. So it's a real simple process where you have a pressure swing absorption unit that just takes the nitrogen out. What do you do with the nitrogen? You vent in the atmosphere And so,

24:32 but we process it to 999.

24:37 helium in a gaseous state. Some of these application wants it in a liquid state. So at that point, then it's shipped to a plant. Lindy has a plant in Kansas, and then it's liquified and then

24:50 distributed thereafter. I was just looking at, I want to link you up with someone Brent at Firefly. They developed this underground storage technology called gas sloop. I was just looking at their

25:02 website real quick because I know off the top of my head it's for that gas and hydrogen. Oh, that'd be awesome. Anyways, regardless, you guys have a great conversation, but he came up to mind

25:14 when we were talking about this, because I think the storage component is super interesting.

25:20 You're talking about energy independence and independent, really, it's not just an energy independence thing. It's an independence and diversification of supply chains across energy, across

25:32 technology. You know, I was at a small little conference with Oracle and NVIDIA, and you look at what's happening with machine learning and artificial intelligence and the amount of compute that is

25:45 coming online, it's almost insatiable. And it's very hard to wrap your head around what is needed to continue growing the

25:58 tech industry from a physical hardware perspective. And you're just talking about what we need for semiconductors and things of this nature And I think that there is this massive movement towards

26:11 onshoring of manufacturing. It's coming back to North America, specifically places like Texas and Mexico. And I think that you can see a lot of manufacturing start co-locating with energy assets.

26:24 But I didn't think about it from a helium perspective of, yeah, hey, we'll build semiconductors in the US, but we wanna know that we have a guaranteed supply of - Wait a second, didn't Panasonic

26:34 build like a. multi-billion dollar facility in Kansas for some conductors? Yeah, it's actually a battery plant. It's a battery plant? Yeah, okay, that battery plant there. But it's one of the

26:44 biggest economic booms that Kansas has had. We're seeing a lot of those things from the IRA bill where they're coming in and building these massive facilities, which I'd love to see, like America

26:55 just needs to get back to being a country or you're building shit, right? And so, but I didn't think of, this is definitely gonna open up the Pandora's box of how I'm thinking, 'cause I didn't

27:03 think about helium supply Um, but the, uh, a lot of what you said, you had to look up the term opaque, um, because that's what I was getting at. I was like, you know, it just doesn't seem to

27:14 be like a clear market, um, for, hey, what is the price of helium? But it makes perfect sense that these, uh, large corporations, they have the contracts and they partner up with producers to

27:23 buy it. Yeah, I think that, you know, you probably see the same thing in the LNG space where it's like, hey, we'll go partner up or we'll own the upstream asset and, you know, you're getting,

27:34 whatever the price may be, you're break even, I'm dollar MCF or whatever, and then there's a big Arb there for your product. But that, I think that all of that is super interesting and probably

27:46 has,

27:48 it's gonna evolve a lot over the next 10 to 15 years as more companies look to manufacture in the United States. Yeah, those are all that spot on, Colin. You know, about the supply chain, how

28:01 we're trying to participate in the supply chain And the pricing, and again, that's the question. There's not the hedging of helium necessarily. There's not the instruments out there for hedging

28:14 helium. And so what we're doing is we're balancing with the 500 in MCF for X amount of wells. We're keeping our options open. So it's kind of an indirect hedge to lock some of it in in 500 and then

28:30 do the spot market Lindy's been a really good partner of ours. And we hope to sell this additional helium to them, or through them, but there are other avenues selling directly to some of the end

28:44 users. Got you. The field in Arizona, what part of the state is it located in? I've never been there as hard as I'm not familiar with the state, but I'm just certain there are ones. Okay, well,

28:55 you guys now have an official invitation to come. But love to It's fascinating, we are my business partners and board members came down to do the due diligence a couple months ago on this

29:12 acquisition. And we went around and Brad Butler's truck and we opened up each one of the wells, went to the processing plant, saw the Lindy trailers being shipped off But it's right next to it's

29:31 in the four corners area on the eastern side. of Arizona. On the left, we have 27, 000 acres. We're getting additional acreage as well. On the left side is a petrified forest.

29:47 Just fascinating to see this petrified wood all over the place. On the right side or the eastern side is the Navajo reservation. There has been some traditional helium

30:01 production coming out of the Navajo reservation. There's challenges you will never drill in the petrified forest. There are some challenges on the Navajo. We have this nice little 27, 000 acre

30:14 slice where we can develop these wells. We have permission to drill on 40 acre and we've brought in some really good consultants. One consultant we're working with is his name is Nick Steinberger.

30:33 He was with George Mitchell. and he was one of the lead teams that discovered this hydraulic fracking. Cool. And so Nick is just has incredible expertise. Brad Butler has, you know, from a

30:47 fracking standpoint and completion standpoint,

30:51 Brad Butler has the operational expertise and we put them together. And so, you know, we don't know if it's gonna be on density of 40 acres could be, but right now, all of our economics are done

31:04 on drilling one every 160 acres, which still gets us over 150 wells. And anyway, so I got a question about from the geologic perspective, and you may know this, you may not know it, but I'm

31:21 gonna ask it anyways. How does helium originate? You know, you made a comment earlier, it's like, hey, look, this exists in shallow reservoirs, not too deep to where it gets cooked. I'm

31:34 listening to you talk and you say, Hey, it's found in Arizona, it's found in Kansas. Obviously, Kansas has oil and gas production. Arizona doesn't. I'm really curious how did helium originate

31:49 in Arizona? Yeah, it's a chemical process deep in the earth through degradation of thorium and other minerals that causes the helium to generate Got you. I'm going to have to go look into that more

32:04 because I'm curious. I was like, you have these two relatively random places where it seemed to generate and where else could it where else could it be in the United States and throw it on top of

32:18 that. How do you guys know where there is helium geologically? Is it going on getting core samples? Is it running seismic? Yeah, that's a great question and fortunate because of the only gas

32:31 industry, there's been a lot of test wells. that have been drilled in many different basins. And early on, they thought maybe the whole brook basin of Arizona might be a petroleum producing field

32:44 and all they got was helium and nitrogen and CO2. And so just the same geological conditions, the key is trapping. It's trapping. In geological time, that helium molecule, it's just gonna escape

33:00 to the atmosphere Is there anything different that you guys are actually doing in the well to trap that from the formation? You also look just like an oil and gas well. Yeah, so just pretty much

33:10 just like an oil and gas well, what we're doing with the shallow wells, Jake is we drill down right above the formation. We set the pipe and then we do an open hole completion. And so we acidize

33:27 and frack on the tighter ones, channel wells, the ones that will produce a million dollars a few months, that will, no completion on those. It's just pretty much natural, maybe a little bit of

33:41 acid in it. Not much pressure, those have. Not much when they come online? Not much, they're, you know, 100, 200 pounds PSI, we put them in a compressor and it floats. So they're not high

33:56 pressure. Yeah. What you thought? I don't know what the pressure is on a typical helium tank, but you can just take hits right off the well. Oh, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

34:07 So what, another exciting component 27 our of, 000 acres, we have three deep-seated structures, which could be very significant. But what's interesting when you say deep-seated structures in the

34:24 Holbrook basin, it's 3, 800 feet. Yeah. So as we're doing these developmental wells and drill it down, we'll just set some casing over it. and then we'll go down and test these deep seated

34:36 formation. So yeah, it's ideal from a company standpoint to have existing, producing assets, developmental drilling opportunity that are very low risk, but have all this tremendous upside. And

34:52 so we have positioned, and I've positioned the company under the direction of the board to really have a low risk revenue generating with an incredible upside. Is the, you may not be able to speak

35:10 to this, just given the nature of being a public company, but what's your plan and the board's vision for the company do you guys see you as becoming one of the premier

35:23 acres holders of helium and, you know, selling to, you know, this to, you know, this. So out of Pioneer Natural Resources is looking to maybe diversify their business in the natural resource.

35:37 Do you guys, you know, well, how do you all think about that and just terms of positioning in the market and the future of the company?

35:46 There are a lot of small EP companies that are, you know, looking for helium. They have acreage blocks. They're shooting seismic. They're drilling exploratory wells The way I look at that, Colin,

35:60 is they're kind of on the outside looking at it. What we have established here with total helium, with our

36:11 production acquisition, non-exploratory project, but a production acquisition with low risk drilling, we're now on the inside. So we are from a junior oiling gas standpoint We are either the only

36:26 or one of a few that is actually producing helium. And so it puts us in a league of our own. Yeah. Now that we have current production and we have this robust drilling program of low risk drilling

36:40 with the great ups. So why do you think oil and gas companies haven't attacked that resource harder? I mean, they have the skill set, the engineering knowledge, the capital, what's kept any of

36:53 these bigger companies larger independence from exploring that? So it's always a discussion topic. And there will be more advancement to other oil and gas companies and getting into the helium

37:10 business. We are fortunate that we are one of the first movers. Yeah. In acquiring lands and developing these. You go explore for helium, where there is helium. And when I first heard someone

37:25 say, The Holbrook Basin is the. Saudi Arabia of helium. I thought that's kind of cheesy statement, but then I thought It's so true. I I met there was a helium conference in Denver a little over a

37:42 month ago with scientists literally from all over the world

37:48 and And I I I queried one of them Chris Valentine who's a Oxford geochemists Who was looked for helium his whole life, and he did his undergrad work in the Hugueten Basin I've known Chris for a

38:02 really long time. I Asked him, you know, what's the highest helium concentration in The world he said well, there was one that had like 20 which was one well That was just anomalous. Yeah, but

38:19 he said the whole brook basin is is literally the some of the highest helium Intrations in the world and so you go there now. Let me Let me

38:31 share a little bit about ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil is a large producer of helium. And again, back to your comment about a by-product, they have one of the most incredible fields I've seen in my life.

38:45 It's called the LaBarge field in Wyoming. These wells will produce

38:53 20, 000 or 20 million to 50 million - I mean, they're just hog wells. This field has produced seven TCF in the last 20 years at a half a percent helium. And so the wells are flat. The only reason

39:12 it's not producing more - and they're not drilling more - is their 2 billion processing plant can't handle anymore. And so they are part of the helium business. But again, it's a by-product of

39:25 helium And so we are focusing on those. on those assets that have a higher percentage, really good paybacks and

39:38 inexpensive drilling. Yeah, no, it's, the reason I ask that question is 'cause I think there's opportunity in many different areas of business and

39:51 sometimes it just takes like a different mindset to say, hey, we're gonna be a helium, EMP, and that's what we're gonna focus on Well, it's a byproduct for other producers. It's gonna be our

40:02 main product and taking one having an open mind and taking a look at a field in Arizona where that might scare other producers from, okay, we're not gonna go sink money into that, especially if

40:18 it's not our core product. So that's why I asked that question just 'cause I think that that's interesting how I identified opportunity and pursue it. Yeah, I think you're right I think there will

40:28 be other. other companies possibly coming to the helium. What we're doing at Total Helium is we're the first, one of the first movers. Very, to be one of these small junior companies that are

40:41 currently producing. Well, now after these podcasts, I mean, the cats out of the bag, so. Yeah, you'd have a lot of it. You'd have a lot of competitive. You'd have a lot of competitive. No,

40:50 this is super fascinating stuff. I think that, you know, I'm gonna take some stuff away from it and chew on it, especially around supply chain and manufacturing in the United States and the role

41:01 that helium plays in that. And so if anyone wants to find you, Robert, or do you guys have a website or on LinkedIn and work for it, can they find you? Well, all the above, it's totalheliumcom.

41:13 Cool. And I'm just so delighted to be here on Wednesday. We just closed on this acquisition on Monday. Yeah. And again, we'll have, with the two, five, six, will have, you know, 10 to 15

41:28 while. We'll have another 10 wells in the next three months too, and we're just getting after it. We're making money. Robert's riding on the high of closing the deal, and he's ready to go poke

41:40 some holes on the ground and make some helium. We'll have to get out there sometime and come shoot some video content and tell the story of producing helium in Arizona because I think that that's a

41:51 pretty cool story to tell. So if y'all are listening to this podcast and you're interested in helium, you're interested in going or working for a robber, you're interested in investing, whatever

42:02 it may be, give them a shout. We'll put a link to his LinkedIn in the show notes and we will link to the website and as always if you enjoyed this episode, which I know I enjoy this one. Share it

42:15 with a friend, share it on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, all the social media platforms. Always appreciate y'all sharing the show. Robert, thanks for coming on today, man Thanks for what you

42:26 guys are doing. I'm really honored to be here. Thank you.