Southwest Saskatchewan added a new claim to fame last month.

Originally announced back in May of 2020, North American Helium (NAH) swung open the doors of its new 32 million dollar Helium Purification Facility near Battle Creek at the end of April, purported to be the largest Facility of its kind in Canada.

Expected to be able to produce 50 million cubic feet of helium per year, the plant is a part of the Sask Party government's strategy to diversify its energy portfolio.

Helium, the only truly "non-renewable" resource, has seen widespread increases in usage over the last number of years and is listed in both Canada and the United States as a "critical mineral"; meaning that it is considered necessary for the functioning of a modern economy.

While most tend to think of Helium in terms of party balloons (of note, the new Battle Creek facility can fill 400,000 children's ballons per year), most of helium's use comes in science and industry; used in such things as Magnetic Resonance Imagers (MRIs) and even space flight, both fields where the helium's ability to be super-cooled while remaining in a liquid state comes in handy.

Yet while helium is the most abundant element in the universe, it's comparatively rare here on earth; with its extraction coming mostly as a by-product of other mining activities like natural gas.

In basic terms, Helium is created through the radioactive decay of certain other elements, such as Uranium. Because of its lightweight nature, it bubbles up through the crust of the earth until some of it gets trapped in pockets of natural gas where it becomes accessible to humans. Most of it misses those pockets and continues to bubble up until it escapes the surface.

Since Helium is lighter than air, the planet's atmosphere is unable to keep it in; effectively bleeding its helium supply constantly into space. Hence the "non-renewable" tag, as it is the only element that once it's been used it's gone completely.

Those three elements; its rarity, its value in scientific advancement, and its non-renewable nature, make it more expensive as time moves forward, with the prices fluctuating wildly in the last few years.

Canada, meanwhile, sits on the fifth-largest reserves of Helium in the world, while Saskatchewan is one of the few jurisdictions that can support the drilling of dedicated Helium wells rather than as a byproduct of other drilling operations.

The new NAH facility now means that there are nine active Helium wells in the province and 24 more in the drilling phase.