Helix Exploration

Independent American Helium

Good Morning Team.

Let’s do this one more time.

Helix Exploration is a London-listed company that has, in under two and a half years, gone from a speculative helium exploration story in northern Montana to a vertically integrated American helium producer — owning its own wells, its own drilling rig, and, as of July 2026, its own liquefaction plant in Oklahoma.

It reached first commercial helium sales roughly 24 months after IPO, a pace that few junior resource companies ever achieve.

It is doing so at the exact moment the global helium market has entered its worst supply crunch in a generation, with more than half of global supply disrupted through a combination of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Russian export curbs and China restricting its own exports.

And with the production story sits a perhaps unique geological asset — independently verified by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as carrying one of the highest helium-3 signatures ever recorded in a producing helium field, alongside indications of a rare underground argon source and an active geological hydrogen system that has already attracted funded interest from the US Air Force.

From IPO to Producer: The Story So Far

Helix listed on AIM in 2024 at 10p per share, built around the Rudyard Helium Project in Blaine County, northern Montana, and a secondary asset called Ingomar.

Founder and CEO Bo Sears brought roughly 27 years of helium-industry experience to the project, including authorship of a book on America’s disappearing helium supply, testimony before the US House of Representatives on the subject, and a track record that includes leading the discovery of Canada’s first Grade-A capable helium project.

That pedigree matters in a niche industry where very few operators actually understand helium geology and processing end to end.

The Rudyard story has been one of consistent geological outperformance.

Every well drilled at the field has been a producer.

Wells were found to be capable of flowing gas at roughly 2,000 thousand cubic feet a day, with a helium concentration around 1.1% — comfortably above the level needed for a well to be commercially viable.

Management chose to bring the field on in a deliberately conservative, measured way, running wells at around 1,500 Mcf/day during commissioning rather than pushing them to rated capacity immediately, a decision explicitly designed to protect long-term well performance rather than chase short-term output.

Right now, three wells — Darwin, Linda and Weil — are in production and feeding an on-site processing plant, with a fourth well, Inez #1, going through a re-entry and retrieval operation after equipment became lodged downhole during original perforation.

Management’s stated intention is to bring Inez online from the Souris River interval, which would take the current plant to its four-well design capacity.

Crucially, Sears made a deliberate strategic call — one that frustrated some shareholders in the near term — to wait until gas was physically flowing before inviting potential offtake customers to site.

Rather than sell forward on paper, he wanted buyers to see the plant running and test the product for themselves.

That patience paid off spectacularly in its timing - the company’s first offtake arrangement, agreed in May 2026, landed in the middle of the tightest helium market in years, and was struck at prevailing spot rates rather than a discounted long-term contract price.

On 20 July 2026, roughly two years after IPO, Helix’s first jumbo tube trailer — carrying around 160 thousand cubic feet of compressed high-grade helium — physically departed Rudyard for delivery to that customer, described only as a large industrial gases group with a strong balance sheet (but it’s not hard to guess the name).

That was the moment Helix converted from an exploration story into a revenue-generating producer, and the company is now reporting continuous trailer rotation at Rudyard, with both its own leased trailers and the customer’s trailers cycling through the site to keep supply flowing.

Building the Full Value Chain

What makes this company different from the usual helium small cap story is that Helix controls the entire chain from the ground to a liquid, globally tradeable product.

The first piece of the puzzle was ownership of the drill rig itself.

In June 2026, Helix acquired Treasure State Drilling, the Montana contractor whose rig had drilled the company’s existing production wells, for $600,000 — paid entirely in new shares, with zero cash outlay — against an independent appraisal of the rig package at just under $1 million.

The commercial logic is simple - every well drilled from that point forward avoids the day-rate charges and mobilisation and demobilisation costs that every other operator in the basin has to absorb, and Helix removes the risk of ever being stuck waiting for a contracted rig to become available, since by the company’s own account this is currently the only drilling rig operating in north-central Montana.

There is also a call option embedded in the deal - with a skilled crew and rig sitting idle between Helix’s own drilling campaigns, there’s also potential to hire the rig out to other operators in a region where interest in oil and gas activity is rising alongside higher oil prices, turning a cost-saving acquisition into a potential standalone profit centre over time.

And who would process any find?

That’s right.

The second and by far the more transformational piece was the acquisition of the Keyes Helium Complex in Oklahoma, announced 2 July 2026 and completed less than two weeks later.

Until this point, Helix could only sell raw or compressed helium gas regionally by truck.

Keyes is a helium purification and liquefaction facility — one of only six such plants operating anywhere in the United States — and owning it means Helix can now convert its own gas, or gas bought in from third parties, into liquid helium.

For context, liquid helium is the form in which the commodity moves around the world and it commands a structural pricing premium over gas because critical end-uses including MRI machines, semiconductor fabs and aerospace have no real substitute.

Basically, it opens Helix up to a global buyer base rather than whichever regional customer happens to be closest to Montana.

It also gives Helix a second, largely independent revenue stream - full tolling capacity, meaning it can process third-party helium — including gas drawn from the old US Bureau of Land Management crude helium reserve — for a fee, regardless of how much its own wells are producing at any given time.

Keyes already has an established, profitable operating history before Helix bought it, generating close to $2.9 million of revenue and $1.42 million of EBITDA in just the five months to the end of May 2026, underpinned by existing multi-year tolling relationships with other industry customers.

Management’s own figures put the purchase price of $11 million (mostly cash, a small stock component) against an estimated replacement cost of around $31 million, arguing that building an equivalent facility from scratch today would likely take over five years and run into a regulatory environment — including restricted access to federal helium land permits — that no longer allows for it.

In other words, like with helium itself, the asset they’ve really bought is scarcity.

Since completion, Helix’s own operations team has been running the plant on site, with tube trailers being filled and third-party helium tolled through the facility on a weekly cadence, generating revenue independently of the Rudyard ramp-up.

To fund the Keyes purchase and accelerate Montana drilling at the same time, Helix raised roughly £17.6 million in early July 2026 through an institutional placing and retail offer via the RetailBook platform, priced at 22p per share.

The retail leg was comfortably oversubscribed, and Drachs, the company’s largest shareholder and a family office with over a billion dollars under management, subscribed for around £7 million of the placing, taking its holding to roughly 18.8% and earning the right to appoint two non-executive directors plus a board observer.

I’d note on that 22p price - it feels much like GGP’s 4.8p. It feels too low but ultimately that was the price of buying the farm; and the resulting returns will be worth it.

In other words, despite the short term pain, the assets acquired with the new shares increased the value per share.

That governance upgrade has already started to play out - Rob Marshall, a Drachs nominee with board experience at gold producer Metals Exploration (side note, excellent company), joined the Helix board as a non-exec in mid-August.

The company also professionalised its finance function around the same time, appointing US-based Matthew Ciardiello — a natural resources specialist with two decades of experience including public-company CFO roles and his own prior helium-adjacent exploration venture in Montana — as the new CFO, consolidating finance in the US.

Wading Into the Helium Supply Crisis

None of this would matter nearly as much without the backdrop it’s happening against.

Helium has entered what industry veterans, including Bohimself, describe as its fifth major supply crisis in under 20 years — and by most accounts, the worst one.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which a large share of Qatari helium exports transits, has been closed following military escalation in the region, and a Qatari LNG facility associated with helium processing has reportedly been taken offline entirely.

Qatar alone represents roughly a third of global helium supply.

Russia, worth around another tenth of global trade, has also curtailed exports. And China, which had been sourcing a meaningful share of its own helium from Russia, has begun restricting its exports too, in order to keep supply for domestic use.

Put together, more than half of the world’s helium supply has effectively been taken off the market at the same time, layered on top of an already-declining legacy US supply base as the historic BLM Cliffside and Hugoton systems wind down.

The result has been a spot pricing environment that could eventually become somewhat of a disaster (for the world, not HEX).

Helix’s first offtake deal, priced deliberately at spot rather than locked into a long-term contract, sits squarely inside this window — meaning the company is currently capturing pricing upside directly rather than having sold it away in advance.

There is a structural angle here too.

The United States removed helium from its official critical minerals list some years ago and sold off its strategic Cliffside helium reserve, a decision that, in the current environment, looks premature at best.

(The US also sold off all its critical mineral reserves because they thought they could rely on China. American politics are just as bright as ours).

With defence, healthcare and semiconductor applications all dependent on secure helium supply, and with foreign sourcing now demonstrably vulnerable to the constant geopolitical shocks the world keeps experiencing, there is a real possibility that US policy shifts back toward treating domestic helium production as a strategic priority — which would be a direct and lasting tailwind for a vertically integrated US producer like Helix, positioned entirely outside the reach of Hormuz, Russia or China.

At the very least, Tier 1 customers will pay a premium for security of supply.

Blue-Sky Potential: Helium-3, Geological Hydrogen and Underground Argon

Beyond the production and pricing, there’s also independently verified evidence that Rudyard sits on top of an unusually deep, ancient, and geologically active reservoir system, with commercial implications well beyond ordinary helium.

In June 2026, Helix released the results of noble gas isotope analysis carried out by Dr Peter Barry at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, one of the most respected earth-science research institutions in the world.

Across all three producing wells, helium-3 to helium-4 ratios came back consistently in the range of 0.665 to 0.690 relative to air — more than thirty times typical crustal helium values — with the concentrated production gas stream itself recording 855 parts per billion of helium-3, one of the highest readings ever documented in any producing helium field anywhere.

That signature indicates the gas at Rudyard is not the product of ordinary radioactive decay in the crust, as most commercial helium is, but carries a mantle-derived component, meaning the field sits above deep crustal fractures with a connection to material far below the surface.

Bo has described the geological picture directly - Rudyard sits above what was effectively a laccolith, a volcano that never fully broke the surface, and that structure gives it direct communication with the mantle in a way conventional helium fields simply don’t have.

That single piece of evidence underpins three separate, potentially very valuable stories.

The first is geological hydrogen.

A mantle connection is the deep plumbing needed for serpentinisation, the natural rock-water reaction that generates hydrogen at depth without any human energy input and without carbon emissions.

Lab mineral analysis of Rudyard rock samples has already confirmed the presence of serpentine, olivine and magnetite — the mineral signatures of rock that has either already undergone or is actively undergoing this transformation.

At Helix’s other Montana asset, Ingomar, historic drilling recorded mud gas readings of nearly 12% hydrogen, described by management as the biggest surprise of their careers and a reading nobody in the team had ever seen before — yet the underlying Flathead Formation there has never been commercially flow-tested, meaning that story is still entirely in front of the company rather than behind it.

(And now they have revenue to go back).

The strategic significance of this has already attracted real, funded external validation.

Helix was selected — beating out roughly thirty respondents including national labs and university research groups — to participate in a US Air Force-linked geologic hydrogen resilience programme, funded through Renaissance Philanthropy’s Chimaera Fund, because Rudyard sits only around 120 miles from Malmstrom Air Force Base, home to part of America’s nuclear missile fleet, at a time when Congress has mandated dramatically improved energy resilience at critical military installations by 2030.

Basically, limitless uninterruptible energy is something US nuclear forces apparently want.

Can’t imagine why.

And HEX isn’t a passive observer in that programme - it’s being paid to contribute real subsurface, drilling and geochemical data as an active collaborator, which management frames as the US government effectively helping to fund the proof of its own resource.

The second story is helium-3 itself as a saleable product, distinct from ordinary helium-4.

Helium-3 trades at roughly $2,500 per litre — 100,000x the price of ordinary helium — because of its use in advanced scientific and quantum computing applications.

It’s currently sourced almost entirely through tritium decay in a small number of heavy-water reactors rather than being extracted commercially from natural gas streams anywhere in the world.

No commercial technology yet exists to separate helium-3 from helium-4 at scale, a point management has been direct about rather than overselling — but that gap is exactly the kind of problem that attracts serious capital and engineering effort as the underlying resource is proven.

The problem is being worked on.

Interlune might be there soon.

And Rudyard’s helium-3 travels through Helix’s existing production stream in a form that is already enriched and ready to be tested by any future separation partner.

The third is underground argon.

The same isotope analysis found argon signatures 27-33 times above atmospheric values, with a profile similar to the only other known commercial source of underground argon in the world, a field in Cortez, Colorado currently supplying a consortium including Princeton and ETH Zürich for a major international dark-matter physics experiment.

Rudyard’s argon-40 concentration is roughly three times higher than what has been reported at Cortez.

The final confirmatory test, a direct argon-39 measurement, was still being arranged as of the June RNS, so this remains a step away from full confirmation — but the early data points toward Rudyard potentially becoming only the second commercial underground argon source on the planet, in a market with no established pricing precedent because of how genuinely scarce the material is.

Taken together, this is the part of the Helix story that could yet prove Rudyard up as one of the most geochemically significant noble gas accumulations found in North America in years — sitting, almost by accident, 120 miles from a nuclear missile base.

With the US in panic mode.

What This Could Be Worth

Management’s own stated ambition is to keep drilling at Rudyard, targeting roughly one new well per quarter and building toward around 20 wells over the next several years, alongside continued growth at Keyes and the possibility of tolling third-party gas from across an increasingly fragmented US helium supply base as older systems like Hugoton decline.

Using Sears’ own cited figure of roughly $4 million of annual revenue per well at scale, twenty wells implies something in the region of $80 million of annual helium revenue from Rudyard alone, before any contribution from Keyes tolling revenue and before any value is attached to hydrogen, helium-3 or argon.

Applying even a conservative multiple to that revenue base, once the field is fully proven and producing consistently, points toward a market capitalisation many multiples of where Helix trades today.

Bo has also been explicit about his own personal ambition - to build Helix into the second-largest domestic helium producer in the United States behind ExxonMobil, on the basis that the major industrial gas companies — Linde, Air Products, Exxon — are enormous buyers and processors of helium but are, structurally, not explorers or drillers themselves.

Helix will likely also keep acquiring.

The company has now done the hard part that most junior resource companies never manage — it found an excellent deposit, drilled it successfully, built and commissioned the processing infrastructure, and got it into paying customers’ hands inside two years - and all while global helium pricing happened to spike to some of the highest levels in the industry’s history.

It has just added the liquefaction and drilling infrastructure that turns it from a single-site gas producer into an independent integrated American helium company, at a discount to what that infrastructure would cost to build new.

And it’s sitting on independently verified geochemistry that opens the door to at least three additional, currently unmonetised value streams, one of which already has the US Air Force paying to help prove it up.

Ultimately, I think the market is potentially underpricing Helix on several levels at once.

A. Current earnings power - what Rudyard and Keyes can generate as the existing operations mature.

B. Production growth - what Rudyard could look like at 10–20 wells as Helix moves from a handful of producing wells towards a serious US helium producer.

C. Strategic value - what it means to own scarce US helium processing and liquefaction infrastructure at a time when domestic supply is becoming increasingly strategically important. And then, sitting on top of all three, is

D. Blue Sky optionality — Helium-3, geological hydrogen and underground argon, none of which needs to work for the core investment case to be compelling.

That’s why I think the market may still be missing the asymmetry in Helix - you are potentially buying the proven He-4 business and its growth at a valuation that doesn't fully reflect either the strategic value of the platform or the enormous geological optionality underneath it.

Imagine you’re Linde, Air Products, ExxonMobil or another major industrial buyer.

You don’t necessarily care whether HEX is worth £100 million or £400 million based on a small-cap P/E multiple.

Your question is this:

‘How much would it cost us, and how long would it take us, to recreate this strategic position?’

If the answer is:

‘Years, tens of millions of dollars, permits we may not be able to obtain, plus finding and developing a helium resource…’

…then the replacement value of the platform can become much higher than its conventional accounting/NAV value.

And the rare gases on top make this a one of a kind find.

Can it go higher?

Drachs clearly thinks so.