16
Soopers in Longmont, Colo., providing free kids’ balloons,
forget it: A sign there earlier this year indicated that “Due to
the Worldwide Helium Shortage that we are currently experi-
encing,” visiting tots were just going to have to learn resilience.W
hen Bluett and Abraham-James first Googled
“helium” and “Tanzania” in November 2013, the
name Peter Barry came up. He’d published on
helium isotopes found in the country and was working in the
University of Oxford lab of Chris Ballentine, who was about to
publish his theory on the combination of factors that would
generate a high accumulation of the gas.
Helium is produced on Earth by the natural radioactive
decay of uranium and thorium, which are present in all rocks.
But that process takes a long time—as in billions of years—so
you’d need some seriously old stones. And because such old
rocks don’t have a lot of gas-trapping formations, you’d need
some geologic activity to break them apart and form fractures
through which the helium could escape. Then you’d need heat
to push the helium up through the fractures, and sedimen-
tary formation at the surface to store it in traps between the
layers of sediment, as in a reservoir.
Ballentine and colleague Diveena Danabalan identified
Tanzania as one place with this kind of interplay at work.
Ancient rocks formed in the African tectonic plate about
2 billion years ago, making them sufficiently old for radio-
active decay to produce a lot of helium. Thirty million years
ago, the plate began to pull apart, forming the Great Rift
Valley, which reaches 1,700 miles from southern Tanzania up
to Eritrea and the Red Sea. That process created fractures
that allow magma to escape; the magma would provide the
heat necessary to force the helium upward. Meanwhile, at
the surface, sediments were deposited, providing the reser-
voirs where helium could be found. “That combination of fac-
tors makes possible helium accumulation at the surface,” says
Emmanuel Kazimoto, a geology lecturer at the University of
Dar es Salaam.
Bluett and Abraham-James showed Ballentine the old paper
they’d found. “I’m always surprised when one of my theories
turns out to be correct,” Ballentine says. “But it was absolutely
obvious at that moment, having looked at what would make a
good helium system, that this was one.” He and Barry agreed
to come down to Tanzania to resample seeps from the springs
James had discovered 58 years earlier. “They had no idea how
to collect a sample like that,” Barry says. “That’s my expertise.”
In September 2015, Bluett and Abraham-James formed a
company they called Helium One Ltd., with Abraham-James
as managing director and Bluett as technical director, and
acquired the necessary government licenses. A couple of
months later, Abraham-James and Barry climbed into a rented
Toyota Land Cruiser to make the dusty drive to a salt pond in
Itumbula, a village in southwestern Tanzania 50 miles from
the Zambian border, where T.C. James had bottled high con-
centrations of helium. Barry ferried the samples to England to
analyze them with specialized equipment called a mass spec-
trometer, a more exact method than the instruments James
had used. The device confirmed James’s findings. “As we go
back year to year,” Barry says, “we see the same values, so it
gives us a lot of confidence in the measurements.”Mtili extracts gas from a meter below ground, saving it in a bagBloomberg Businessweek / SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 THE ELEMENTSO
n July 5, Karim Mtili, a 26-year-old geology grad
student at the University of Dar es Salaam, walks out
onto a berm constructed to facilitate access to the
salt pond in Itumbula. He’s wearing soccer shorts, a white
T-shirt, and Crocs-like rubber boots and holding an empty
plastic water bottle, a large funnel, and a copper tube. People
have been collecting salt here for probably 10,000 years, and
today it’s the main source of income in Itumbula, a village
three hours from the nearest hospital with no paved roads,
where most residents live in small shacks with a single light-
bulb. But Helium One might be able to change things. Royalties
from the helium it discovered there could be worth more than
11% of Tanzania’s annual gross domestic product.
Mtili is here to collect the last set of hundreds of samples
of gas seeping from the salt pond before the work to map
subsurface reservoirs begins later this year. He wades into the
water as white egrets tiptoe around the shallow edges of the
pond and cattle in the distance audibly air their grievances.
“Do you see all these bubbles?” Mtili asks with excitement. At
least 15 seeps are visible, creating air pockets from the pond’s
floor that rise to the surface at varying frequencies. “If it was
coming from the same source, it would be flowing at the same
rate. So that explains the percentage differences in different
samples,” he says.
Standing in water up to his crotch, Mtili submerges the
funnel and bends down to push the wide end into the pond’s
muddy bottom. With his other hand, he raises the tube so
the gas can rise into it. “You have to fill all this with water and
let the seep gas displace the water,” he says. Wading deeper
into the pond, he calls in Swahili to Godfrey Myega, a local
who helps out sometimes and has stripped down to his boxer
shorts for the task. The big man squeals as he steps into the
hot water, carrying in Mtili’s upturned baseball hat some glass
vials and small vacuum-sealed bags that will be filled with gas
and, later, connected to the mass spectrometer in Mtili’s hotel
room, four hours away. “This rock that I’m sitting on is pretty,
pretty hot,” Mtili says.
Bluett and Abraham-James found geophysical surveys of the
area that Amoco Corp., now part of BP Plc, had conducted
in the 1980s while looking for oil. It didn’t locate any oil but,
just as Ballentine predicted, spotted a bounty of sedimentary
traps where helium could accumulate. “Seismic techniques can
image the subsurface, so you can look and say you have this
much gas,” Barry says. Samples such as those Mtili was col-
lecting show the percentage of this gas that’s helium. “Then