North American Helium – Battle Creek Helium Purification Facility

Photo courtesy North American Helium

Battle Creek Helium Purification Facility

The organization

Founded in 2013, North American Helium Inc. (NAH) is a Calgary-based, private helium exploration and production company.

To its knowledge, NAH is the only company in the past 40 years to successfully explore for and discover new non hydrocarbon-based economic fields of high helium gas in North America. Over the past several years, NAH has made five new discoveries and acquired rights to explore for and produce helium on a land base of over 5.7 million contiguous acres, primarily in Saskatchewan and Utah. The company owns and operates Canada’s largest helium purification facility, providing a reliable, long-term North American supply of this scarce resource to meet growing demand.

NAH has been the most active helium driller in Saskatchewan with 37 wells drilled to date. The company plans to have a continuous capital investment program, which will include acquisition of additional third-party and proprietary seismic data, drilling 20 wells per year, and concurrently building additional helium processing facilities as new fields are developed.

The achievement

North American Helium opened Canada’s largest helium purification facility in April. Located near Consul in southwest Saskatchewan, the new $32-million facility is expected to produce more than 50 million cubic feet per year of purified helium for commercial sale.

Engineering for this project involved civil, mechanical, electrical and process engineering.  All the disciplines were utilized to complete this successful Battle Creek Helium Purification facility on time and under budget.

For example, civil engineering started with all the foundations of all the skids and finished with the building to house all the equipment of the plant.  Mechanical engineering was utilized to design the interconnecting piping of the process equipment.  Electrical engineering was employed to tie SaskPower into the site and service all the equipment for their electrical needs.  Finally, the process engineering was used to make all the pieces of equipment required to purify the gas so that NAH could meet sales gas specifications of 98.5 to 99.999 per cent helium.

The team

Journey Engineering provided overall design services for the Battle Creek Purification Plant.  This included design works from all disciplines: civil, structural, process, mechanical, electrical and instrumentation. In addition to the interface design work, and the direct design work on the balance of plant equipment, Journey also provided interface management between third-party equipment suppliers to integrate the packages into the overall design.

The lead engineers on the project who are APEGS members are Stuart Ridgway, P. Eng., and Kaj Christensen, P. Eng.

Ridgway provided process engineering support and project oversight for North American Helium. This involved providing base design criteria for all of the equipment vendors, sizing the ancillary equipment and interconnecting piping. Christensen was the mechanical and project engineer on the project, tasked with mechanical interface management, piping design and procurement support for the process and mechanical equipment.

Vance Blydo, P.Eng., was the project manager from NAH and had full direction of all engineering services to complete the project from the prospective of North American Helium.