One of the rarest gases in the world was discovered over 10 years ago in Minnesota. Now, a company is working on tapping into the deposit and helping with a world-wide shortage of the precious gas.

What's the gas? Helium! There has been a developing helium shortage in recent years across the globe. Helium cannot be recreated chemically, so the best way to get helium is to find it occurring naturally. It's created from naturally decaying radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium.

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Helium is used for all sorts of things, not just your party balloons. It's used in superconductive magnets, cools satellite instruments, and is used in MRI scanners.

Tanya Shulga
Tanya Shulga
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The Ely Echo reports that Pulsar Helium is preparing to re-drill a hole that was drilled in 2011. That's when miners were looking for deposits while prospecting for copper-nickel projects. They hit a pocket of gas and the pressurized gas indicated a large deposit. They did tests on it and found that it contained 10.5% helium which is much higher than other deposits. In fact, there have only been two other deposits in North America over 10%. This could be a huge discovery.

Pulsar Helium says the drilling would be less invasive than what people are used to in the area. The drilling pad takes up about two acres.

 

The gas is lighter than air, so it will come to the surface on its own.

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The location of the deposit is in Lake County, Minnesota, off the Dunka River Road. Pulsar Helium plans to do the drilling in February to test how big the deposit is.

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If the pocket is as rich and as large as they hope, it could bring millions of dollars to the region.

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

Gallery Credit: Sophia Crisafulli

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