Clayten Wenaas, Kurt Silbernagal and Ty Eklund in North American Helium’s processing plant in Mankota, Sask.Chris Wilson-Smith/The Globe and Mail
The gravel lot is quiet, the building squat and windowless – about the size of a small hockey rink. There’s a machine humming from somewhere inside, but not enough to drown out the lowing of cattle just over the fence.
Then a door opens with a hollow report. It’s from a smaller building near the road – one of a few scattered across a wide, empty patch of prairie. A man steps out and waves from the top of a short metal staircase. That must be Clayten Wenaas, a field engineer and operations superintendent with North American Helium Inc.
This small structure is the control room – quiet, cool and filled with the smell of the most awful, perfect kind of coffee. Two other men sit in high-backed office chairs, shifting seamlessly between small talk and technical diagnostics. After a while, one of them leans forward: “Wanna go check it out?” Mr. Wenaas grabs a helmet off the shelf and offers it up.
Over a short walk to the larger building, he and the two operations managers – Ty Eklund and Kurt Silbernagal – describe what awaits: a maze of compression skids, heat-exchange chillers and pressure-swing adsorption towers, each component fine-tuned to remove trace gases and deliver high-purity helium.
“It’s all automated, but we’re always watching,” Mr. Wenaas says. “Any pressure change or temperature shift – we’re on it.”
He opens the door. The sound is intense enough to make you reach for the earmuffs clinging to the top of your helmet – if only one of the others would do the same – and the scale of the operation comes fully into view: tall steel columns, thick interlacing pipes and high-spec equipment spaced just wide enough to move between.
On the outskirts of Mankota, a village of about 200.Chris Wilson-Smith/The Globe and Mail
North American Helium has invested more than half a billion dollars in facilities like this across Saskatchewan’s southwest since the Calgary-based company’s inception in 2013. In less than five years of operation, it now produces about 85 per cent of Canada’s helium, which is created deep beneath the Earth’s surface through the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium.
Its site in Mankota, a village of 200 that was founded more than a century ago, serves as one of the company’s key purification centres. Pipelines running from five well sites, each drilling thousands of metres into underground reservoirs, send helium here to be run through its state-of-the-art systems under the careful eye of the operations crew.
Walking the length of the plant, the trio unpacks the process that unfolds in a surprisingly elegant system of vessels, valves and pipes. “This is one of our more advanced operations,” Mr. Wenaas says. From here, the purified product will be piped into specially fitted transport trucks and carried to the U.S. for final processing – Canada does not have a helium liquefaction facility – and deeper into the supply chain to countries around the world rushing to secure key resources.
Clayten Wenaas and Kurt Silbernagal.Chris Wilson-Smith/The Globe and Mail
Helium is a noble gas, but it’s officially classified as a critical mineral in Canada. The term applies to materials essential to economic and national security, especially those vulnerable to supply disruptions. That includes a broad spectrum of substances, from gases like helium to metals like lithium, which is both a key industrial input and a cornerstone of battery technology. If Canada wants to compete in a high-tech economy, it can’t do it without helium.
“What we don’t have is the liquefaction infrastructure to turn our gas into liquid helium – and that’s the critical missing piece in Canada,” said Clayton Paradis, a company spokesperson. “If we had a liquefier here, we’d eliminate tens of millions of miles of trucking each year just to get our gas processed.
“We could have an ecosystem that includes processing, transport and policy support all right here in Canada.”
That last piece is still catching up. While Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba have introduced supportive policies and critical mineral strategies, Ottawa has yet to meaningfully follow suit – a gap that, according to industry leaders such as Chris Bakker, is hampering investment and slowing the sector’s ability to scale.
Mr. Bakker, co-chair of the Helium Developers Association of Canada, is pushing the federal government to match the provincial momentum. The group is urging the government to change tax rules so investors in helium projects can claim the same tax deductions they can with other critical mineral developments. Doing so, he argues, would unlock early-stage investment while also drawing in more foreign investment.
“Canada’s a small country with a limited investment pool,” said Mr. Bakker, who is also the chief executive officer of Avanti Helium Corp., a Calgary-based company with helium plays on both sides of the border. “When I’m competing for those dollars on an uneven playing field, it hurts.”
Canada faces a tricky trade-off. As it looks to reduce reliance on the U.S. for a crucial step in bringing helium to the market, it faces undesirable trade-offs – dealing with nations that Western allies are increasingly distancing themselves from. “If you’re trying to eliminate one geopolitical dependency,” Mr. Bakker said, “why ignore another?”
Investments from emergent industrial companies such as North American Helium are also helping to put Prairie communities that missed the oil boom on the map, adding stable jobs and a steady stream of contracting opportunities in a region where going to work often means leaving home for long stretches.
“You get to be around more,” said Mr. Eklund, who has family around Mankota – a portmanteau of Manitoba and Dakota. “And it’s about being part of something local,” he said. “Feels different.”
Mr. Paradis and Mr. Bakker say what’s happening on the ground in Mankota and across Saskatchewan is proof of concept, a sign that small towns can play a big role in the next industrial wave. For Mr. Silbernagal, whose wife is the principal at the local school, it wasn’t just about the job. It was about being part of a new kind of pioneering taking root in a familiar place.