Next drill campaign coming soon

With energy and fuel prices leading the news cycle again, it’s timely to give an update on how our clean hydrogen plans are shaping up this year.

Gold Hydrogen has had an incredibly busy start to the year ahead of a pivotal few months for our natural hydrogen and helium play in South Australia.

You’ll recall we drilled our new Ramsay 3 and 4 wells late last year, with a bigger bore than the original wells to allow for more critical testing, which is coming up soon.

The intention was to be back on site in Q1 for that work, which should provide the key information needed to form a pilot project plan.

Most of the approvals are in place and the equipment is ready, but we are still working with the State government to finalise the last required approvals. That could push us past Q1, but it will be a minor delay if it pans out that way.

Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for the final third party analysis to come in so we can make comparisons between Ramsay 3 and 4 and the original two wells. We won’t be able to give 100% comparisons to the first two wells as we didn’t take the same range of samples, with the priority readying the wells for the next set of tests. But we will have more data coming out soon.

The other work progressing significantly are studies in how we might use our hydrogen and helium.

The air-corrected purity levels of helium detected to date are world class, and we have tendered to Worley to undertake commercial and production modelling. Their report should be finalized soon.

At the same time, a green methanol feasibility study is under way, headed by Chief Commercial Officer Simon Talbot. With abundant waste agricultural biomass, the Yorke Peninsula is well set up to become a green methanol production hub in tandem with our hydrogen.

I can also report that our major Japanese financial backers – Toyota, Eneos Explorer and Mitsubishi Gas Chemical – continue to be highly engaged.

Last month Eneos’ global CEO visited our Brisbane headquarters for an update on progress, and last week a small Gold Hydrogen delegation met with representatives from the three companies in Japan.

As well, we met with several other major players in the Japanese energy investment landscape and they are monitoring our progress closely.

It’s a waiting game until we get back in the ground for our next round of testing, but in the meantime production options and future commercial planning is well underway.