CHEYENNE WELLS — Colorado’s southeastern plains, still brown from winter and drought, are a long way from the Middle East, but when the Iran war bottled up exports from the Persian Gulf, a resource beneath those prairies became more valuable.
It isn’t oil. It’s helium.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz cut off 30% of the world’s helium supply from Qatar. International industrial gas companies, such as France’s Air Liquide and Ireland-based Linde, declared a force majeure and began rationing helium among their customers.
The major remaining supply, indeed the world’s largest source is the U.S. The country produces about 44% of the world’s helium, with the best reserves stretching roughly from the Texas Panhandle through Colorado and Wyoming into Canada.
And so, on a June morning at the Ladder Creek Helium Plant, just outside Cheyenne Wells, specially designed Air Liquide trailers filled with liquid helium were bound for China, France, Japan, Germany and Austria.
“It is an international market, there is a lot of demand for helium and it’s growing,” said Darin Dickey, co-owner Tumbleweed Midstream, which runs the plant.
After hydrogen, helium — a colorless, odorless, nontoxic gas — is the second most abundant and lightest element in the universe. A quarter of the sun is helium.
It is a small atom, lighter than air. The gas is inert so it does not combine with other elements. It is unique among all the elements in that it can reach ultra-cold temperatures, approaching absolute zero.
Here on Earth, it is widely distributed but only in a few strata is it found in concentrations above 2% making it profitable to harvest. The concentrations in southeastern Colorado reach up to 7%, Dickey said.
As a result of its unique properties the demand for helium has soared. Magnetic resonance imaging machines, or MRIs, are cooled with it. A pure helium environment is used to prevent air bubbles in making fiber optical optic cables. It is vital in making computer chips.
Rocket fuel tanks are pressurized with it and the gas is used to purge rocket engines. Because it is inert, it is used as a shield in arc welding, especially for aluminum and copper.
In scientific research, helium is a coolant in quantum mechanics research, particle accelerators, and specialized solar telescopes.
And of course there are the balloons — blimps, weather balloons and party balloons.
In a five-year span, the price of helium rose 250%, according to the American Chemical Society. Helium is mainly sold in undisclosed, provider-customer contracts making the market opaque.
Just before the Iran war began in March, the price in the spot market, representing about 5% of the trade, was in the vicinity of $300 per million cubic feet, according to Phil Kornbluth, an industry consultant.
By way of comparison, a comparable volume of natural gas would cost $3,100.
Once the Strait of Hormuz was closed the spot price more than doubled and even customers with long-term contracts were hit with a surcharge, Kornbluth said.
That made the helium sitting in the Ladder Creek plant all that more valuable.
“Most companies in most countries might have said we’d rather have helium from the U.S. rather than Qatar, but that difference was very little before this war,” Kornbluth said. “Now that has changed. I am a little bullish on North American production.”
The helium processed at the plant primarily comes from natural gas wells in Kansas and Colorado. Ladder Creek has a 750-mile network of gathering lines from gas wells stretching 155 miles from Holcombe, Kansas, to just outside Hugo.
A mix of hydrocarbon, nitrogen and helium gases arrives by pipeline and the plant uses cold to separate out the constituents.
“Butanes liquify at minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit … methane at minus 250, nitrogen at minus 321 and helium at minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit,” Matt Randel, the plant supervisor, explained.
The natural gas is put into the Colorado Interstate Gas Pipeline where it can head to the Front Range or down into Texas.
Once the helium gas has been separated and purified to 99.999%, it is compressed and sent to a liquefier, which looks a bit like a one-story-tall cocktail shaker. There it is cooled to minus 454 degrees and turned into a liquid product.
Chilling helium and keeping it chilled can be tricky. Even a pinhole leak in the vacuum insulation can undo the liquefier, as can losing 1 degree of cooling.
“Making liquid helium is like magic,” Randel said.
The liquid helium is kept at minus 454 degrees and about 10,000 gallons worth is poured into specially designed liquid helium trailers, which fit on a flatbed trailer.
“They are basically giant thermos bottles,” said Hickey, and each one costs about $1.5 million.
The trailers as well as helium have been tied up in the Persian Gulf, leading to a scramble for containers. “The war has even affected shipments outside the Gulf,” Hickey said.
There only a few liquefaction plants in the world
Ladder Creek is one of only 14 helium liquefaction plants in the world and one of seven in the country. Helium gas is shipped to Ladder Creek from as far away as Canada, in 53-foot-long tubes, to be liquified.
The single largest helium gathering and liquifying operation in the U.S. is ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek Gas and Helium Plant in La Barge, Wyoming. It produces about 20% of the country’s helium.
Cheyenne County is not the only helium hot spot in Colorado; two helium companies are operating in Las Animas County east of Trinidad.
Dallas-based Desert Eagle has nine producing wells and a gas processing plant, according to state records, and Blue Star, which is developing two fields and a processing plant.
Unlike the wells feeding Ladder Creek, Blue Star, which has headquarters in Perth, Australia, is drilling into the pure helium reserves in the Lyons sandstone formation, which runs through Colorado to Wyoming. One of the formation’s best known outcroppings is Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.
The wells are shallow, about 1,000 feet deep. “They are more akin to the depths you might see in a deep commercial water well rather than a gas well,” said Shane Gillespie, president of Blue Star US.
Blue Star has 300,000 acres across Las Animas County and is developing two fields — Galactica and Pegasus. The company completed its processing facility at the end of 2025.
There is no natural gas in the strata but the helium is mixed with carbon dioxide. Gillespie said the plan is to separate the helium and carbon dioxide and sell both.
Carbon dioxide is used in industrial processes, fire suppression and is mixed the medical-grade oxygen to stimulate breathing.
“The name of the game,” Gillespie said, is to compress it, cool it, form it up, decompress it, compress it again.”
There are different grades of industrial gases and the products from Blue Star’s plant, still in gaseous states, will be the most basic — what is known as balloon grade for the helium and beverage grade for the carbon dioxide, which gives soda its fizz.
Buyers of the Blue Star helium may seek to get it further refined for industrial uses, Gillespie said. Ladder Creek does that refining, turning out the purest helium, scientific grade.
One of the biggest challenges in Colorado comes in getting drilling permits from the state’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission, Gillespie and Dickey said.
The gas wells in southeastern Colorado supplying Ladder Creek are 3,000 to 5,000 feet below the surface. They aren’t fracked and take three to four days to drill, Dickey said.
Yet they have to go through the same procedures and filing the same forms as an oil and gas well in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, which can be 10,000-feet deep with underground lateral bores running 2 to 5 miles. All those wells are hydrofractured.
“The operators tell me it takes more than a year to get a permit. It takes weeks in Kansas,” Dickey said. The result is that Ladder Creek is operating at about 30% of its 1.5 million-cubic-feet-per day capacity.
The regulatory differences are even more pronounced for Blue Star.
“There are a great many things that really aren’t applicable to what we’re doing,” Gillespie said. “They’re trying to understand, and we’re trying to explain the differences between what we do and what an oil and gas company does, because it really is a different process.”
“Even though they’ve been given all these new mandates, like geothermal, their staff is basically geared to oil and gas development, that’s what they do,” Gillespie said, referring to the ECMC.
Don’t expect a helium rush
The ECMC does not have separate regulations for helium wells and so they fall under the state’s rules for oil and gas development, John Brown, a spokesperson for the commission, said in an email.
“Helium projects may look different from deeper or horizontally drilled DJ Basin oil-and-gas projects, especially if they are vertical, shallower, and do not involve stimulation,” the industry term for fracking, Brown said.
“However, they still involve drilling, well construction, surface disturbance, production equipment, waste handling, reclamation, and other operational issues that fall within ECMC’s statutory and regulatory responsibilities,” Brown said.
Wavetech Helium, one of the operators supplying Ladder Creek, has a pending oil and gas development plan at the ECMC and several state approved plans in Cheyenne and Kit Carson counties, Brown said.
Despite the helium market being roiled by war and a growing appetite for more geopolitically stable supplies, Kornbluth, the helium industry consultant, cautioned against expecting a huge boom.
Qatar’s Ras Laffan was crippled by Iranian strikes during the war, but the liquified natural gas processing was harder hit than the helium infrastructure.
“We had a surplus prior to the war. If there’s no more damage, we would go back to a surplus situation,” Kornbluth said.
It is unlikely there will be a rush to build new liquefaction plants, Dickey said. When Ladder Creek went into operation in 1997, it cost $100 million to build. He estimates the price tag of a new plant has risen fivefold.
There are a few promising new entrants into the field, like Blue Star and North American Helium in Canada, Kornbluth said. The market will grow, particularly the North American market and for existing companies, but there won’t be a helium rush.
“There are at least 60 helium startups around the world … in North America, Australia, Morocco,” Kornbluth said. “In my view, assuming that we don’t have more severe damage in Qatar, most of those companies are going to go bankrupt.”