Near Babbitt, Minnesota, a nickel exploration crew struck gas carrying 8.1 percent helium, and the forest floor turned out to hold one of the richest untapped reserves in the country
A drill bit grinding through bedrock near Babbitt, Minnesota was supposed to come back coated in flecks of nickel and copper.
Instead it hit gas.
Nobody on that crew was looking for helium, and nobody in Minnesota had ever found commercial quantities of it before.
The helium had been sitting there undisturbed, likely for hundreds of millions of years, until a drill meant for an entirely different metal cracked it open.
But the gas that came up that hole has turned a stretch of forest near the Iron Range into one of the most closely watched discoveries in the country.
So how does a metal exploration hole end up sitting on a gas find like this?
How does helium end up in a nickel exploration hole in the first place?
Helium is not made where it is found. It forms deep in the crust as uranium and thorium atoms decay, shedding alpha particles that are, chemically speaking, bare helium nuclei. That process happens almost everywhere underground, slowly, in tiny amounts.
Which is why most rock never accumulates enough to matter. What makes a spot like Babbitt different is not the helium itself but the trap. The gas needs a sealed geologic reservoir to collect in over time, the same kind of structure an oil company spends years hunting for.
A borehole drilled over a decade ago while scouting the Duluth Complex for platinum and palladium punched straight into one of those seals by accident. The helium had been sitting there undisturbed, likely for hundreds of millions of years, until a drill meant for an entirely different metal cracked it open.
That accident is the entire reason anyone is now running oilfield equipment through a Minnesota pine forest at all.
What does a helium rig look like 65 miles north of Duluth?
The company that followed up on that anomaly, Pulsar Helium, now operates what it calls the Topaz Project in Lake County. The hardware on site would look at home in the Permian Basin far more than the Iron Range.
An oil and gas rig can safely manage gas at the pressures this reservoir produces, so Pulsar brought one in from a Wyoming based drilling contractor rather than use lighter mineral exploration equipment. That matters because the gas at Topaz arrives dry, with no formation water riding along with it.
Water fouls separation equipment and complicates processing in most gas fields. The absence of water here simplifies everything downstream, from the wellhead to the eventual liquefaction plant.
Even so, the surroundings remain almost comically mismatched to the machinery. Forest crowds the clearing on every side, a far cry from the flat caliche pads of West Texas, and the nearest oil patch is a thousand miles away in any direction worth naming.
How rich is this gas, really, and who has checked the numbers?
Flow testing across the project’s wells gives the clearest answer. Pulsar’s Jetstream No. 1 well averaged 8.1 percent helium during testing, a figure that sits roughly 27 times above the 0.3 percent concentration industry generally considers commercially viable.
A second well, Jetstream No. 2, came in at 5.6 percent, still far above that threshold. These are not industry rumors or rough estimates pulled from a press release, and the company’s own project page lays out both results from flow testing in plain terms.
Laboratory work on gas from Jetstream No. 1 also turned up elevated concentrations of helium 3, a rare isotope used in quantum computing and nuclear security applications. Two federal laboratories, the USGS Noble Gas Laboratory in Denver and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, independently confirmed concentrations of 11.2 to 11.9 parts per billion.
For comparison, Qatar’s giant helium operation, the largest in the world, runs on gas that is roughly 0.04 percent helium by volume. Minnesota’s gas, by that measure, is far richer at the wellhead than the world’s dominant supplier.
Where does this fit against a helium market already under strain?
The timing is not incidental. Helium supply has been fragile for years, tied almost entirely to natural gas and LNG production rather than to its own demand, which leaves buyers exposed whenever a gas field slows down or a processing plant goes offline.
Because Topaz produces helium as a primary product rather than a byproduct, Pulsar can in theory respond to demand directly instead of waiting on natural gas economics to justify a well.
Thomas Abraham James, the company’s president and chief executive, has called the helium 3 finding “nothing short of extraordinary,” a characterization that reflects how rare concentrations at this level are in any land based reservoir worldwide. None of that means a finished supply chain exists yet, and reservoir engineers still need to confirm how far the formation extends before anyone commits to a processing plant at scale.
What still has to go right before any of this reaches a customer?
Pulsar has drilled seven wells across the Topaz area with a track record the company describes as a complete success rate, each one intersecting gas. That consistency is encouraging.
But a discovery is not a producing field, and the company’s own public timeline targets a final investment decision only sometime in 2026, with first production not expected until late 2027 at the earliest. Plenty can still complicate that path.
Minnesota has no existing regulatory framework built around helium extraction, and building one will take time and coordination. The reservoir’s lateral extent, meaning how far the gas pocket actually spreads underground, also still needs more appraisal drilling before anyone can put a confident number on how much helium sits down there.
Still, the core fact does not need a final investment decision to be remarkable. A hole drilled for nickel in the Minnesota woods hit one of the richest helium streams ever logged on land, entirely by accident, and the rig crews now working that clearing are using oilfield know how to chase a gas nobody thought to look for in that forest at all.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
