U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY ASSESSMENT OF KNOWN HELIUM RESOURCES IN THE UNITED STATES

The Helium Stewardship Act of 2013 (Public Law 113–40) directed the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to create an accounting of the geologic helium resources of the United States. Helium is a nonrenewable resource that is produced from the subsurface, typically in conjunction with other gases. These coproduced gases are either inert, hydrocarbon-rich, or a mixture of the two. Unlike other USGS natural resource assessments, which have focused on undiscovered resources, this assessment provides an estimate of the volume of producible helium currently remaining in known gas accumulations within the United States.

To complete this assessment, a dataset of helium concentrations was compiled from natural gas analyses from gas wells throughout the United States. These data are primarily from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Federal Helium Program, which has been performing gas compositional analyses for over 100 years. These data were supplemented with data from the USGS Energy Resources Program Geochemistry Laboratory Database (EGDB) (https://certmapper.cr.usgs.gov/data/apps/geochem-db/). The combined dataset is available online both as a data release (https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/609e8fe1d34ea221ce3f39e6) and as an interactive map (https://eerscmap.usgs.gov/heapp/).

The helium data were matched to reservoir and production data from proprietary sources for hydrocarbon-bearing reservoirs and internal datasets from the U.S. BLM for non-hydrocarbon reservoirs. These data sources were used to calculate the total volume of producible gas remaining in the helium-bearing reservoirs. The remaining volume of helium in a given reservoir was calculated using the volume of remaining gas and the helium concentration within the reservoir. The remaining helium for each reservoir was then aggregated to regional and national values. The result of the assessment indicates that there is between 231 and 394 billion cubic feet (BCF) of helium remaining in known gas reservoirs throughout the United States, with a mean value of 306 BCF. Roughly 99% of the helium remaining in the United States is in the Rocky Mountain and Midcontinent regions. The results can be found in a USGS Scientific Investigations Report (https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20215085).