Thor Energy plc (LON:THR) Chief Executive Officer Andrew Hume caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the company’s latest HY-Range Project developments, including exceptional natural hydrogen results and the award of a 2D seismic acquisition programme.
Q1: Now, Thor Energy has recently announced some developments to its HY-Range Project, with both exciting geochemical results and the award of a large 2D seismic acquisition. Andrew, could you just update us on those?
A1: The HY-Range Project is developing quite rapidly. So, as you mentioned, we’ve made two recent announcements, one relating to the geochemical results, our Phase-2 geochemical results, and the other relating to some 2D seismic that we’re about to acquire.
The viewers might remember that in the second half of last year, we announced Phase-1 results, where we found very high readings of natural hydrogen, up to about 3,000 ppm, and also for, in other areas, very highly elevated helium readings as well. So, we wanted to return to the field to better understand those results, to make sure that they were real, they were repeatable results, and also to gain greater data density and increase our coverage across the licence, and also to fine-tune techniques.
We’re developing some proprietary approaches to doing this kind of surface geochemistry work. So, we went back to the field just before the end of last year and rolled into 2026 as well.
As I said, a couple of weeks ago, we announced the results of this Phase-2 work. The long and short of it is our results were exceptional. Not only were we able to repeat the findings we found in Phase-1, we actually found values up to 10 times the maximum value we found in Phase-1. So, to put it another way, we found up to about 60,000 times the expected background values for hydrogen in the air. So, an amazing result that really eclipsed our findings. Obviously, that was the highest value, but we found numerous locations and were able to repeat sampling from those locations where we were getting into the percentage range of hydrogen.
So, it’s very exciting. It’s really telling us that that HY-Range area is a proper nexus for natural hydrogen development. It encourages us to do more work in the area and the next work we’re going to do is that second announcement you mentioned, where we’ve just awarded a contract to an Australian company called Velseis Pty Ltd., who are one of the leading onshore seismic companies.
They’re going to go out later this year and shoot about 460 line kilometres of 2D, following country roads and things like that, so we get a nice grid of 2D data. Now, what 2D seismic is, for those people that may not be aware of it, you create an energy wave that goes into the ground. Some of that energy hits off layers of sediments and harder rocks and faults and other geological features in the subsurface, and then they’re reflected to the surface where we use an array of geophones. They’re like microphones, only we’re listening to vibrations in the ground rather than vibrations in the air and what that does is we can record that information, process it, and it gives us a really high quality, high fidelity understanding of the geology below the ground.
We then marry that with our gravity and magnetic data sets and geochemistry and some of the other data sets. With this information, it’s going to give us a definitive understanding of where the basement is, what’s the nature of the basement, to the best of our understanding, where are migration routes from hydrogen and helium that are formed within the basement, and how they’re going to move into the shallower subsurface to depths and in target intervals where we’re looking to drill.
So, really lots of positive news on HY-Range.
Q2: The project seems to be developing rapidly as it’s bringing together a wide range of information, as you pointed out, different techniques and skill sets. Can you just tell us more about Thor’s approach?
A2: I think the thing that differentiates Thor is that we’re really focused on that intersection of skills. We’re trying to combine more traditional, you know, hard rock mining skill sets, or mineral exploration skill sets and oil and gas skill sets as well. So, this is very much the focus. This is why we’re working in areas of Australia that are traditionally mineral exploration, focus areas, but bringing that oil and gas mindset to look for hydrogen and helium. So, by combining these different ways of thinking, different techniques, techniques that are used more in one sector than the other, try and combine that, use methodologies.
One of the methodologies we use is called play-based exploration, which is very much an approach that’s come out of oil and gas and energy exploration. Trying to work from the large scale, combining data sets and, you know, over time and as your knowledge increases, really allows you to focus in on the right areas to ultimately drill. So, this kind of methodology is really starting to make inroads.
Equally, the commodities we’re chasing are also aligned in this sort of hybrid approach between, you know, conventional mineral exploration and oil and gas. We’re largely focused on fluids, fluids as gases, hydrogen, helium, fluids as in terms of in situ recovery of copper and other things which we’re looking into in the northern ends of the Yorke Peninsula and South Australia as well.
So, again, it’s really about bringing all this, these different mindsets to be open, to be open minded, combine data sets that are not necessarily traditionally used in mineral exploration or oil and gas and coming up with unique solutions.
Q3: The 2D seismic is essentially interesting too. Could you tell us more about the methodology and what perspectives that can provide you?
A3: I come from an oil and gas background. It’s bread and butter to oil and gas, especially offshore. It allows you to get really good understanding of the geology from the surface or the seabed if you’re offshore, all the way down to really understanding the deep basement.
That’s important for oil and gas because we need to understand where the oil and gas is being made, several kilometres down, how it migrates to the surface through faults or other processes, and how it might be trapped in the shallower subsurface, maybe one, two, three kilometres down or something like that.
So, seismic is used in mineral exploration as well, of course it is, but I think the knowledge we can bring from that oil and gas side, the ability to bring that data to the hydrogen-helium project is, I would say, it’s unique, but again, it’s representing that intersection of the two different methodologies.
So what we do is, I mentioned earlier, we use these devices called vibroseis trucks, if you like, they’re quite large trucks, they move along. When they get to a location, they lower a reaction plate down and just create a vibration which goes into the ground. That vibration is not sound, noise, essentially. As I say, it travels down into the ground, reflects off of geological layers of interest.
From this, we’ll be able to see how deep the basement is in certain areas, also getting indications of what that basement character might be, why it may be more or less suited for hydrogen and helium in certain places. We’ll be able to understand where the faults that are going to channel and allow migration of these gases, and then also, hopefully, to find traps where we can actually drill for this.
So, it’s a really important technique and allows us to bring everything together. The end result is we’ll understand more about the geology; we’ll be able to high-grade the area, our leads that we already have identified, we’ll be able to ground truth and sense check how robust they are, and of course, identify new drilling opportunities as well.
