Helix Exploration (LSE:HEX) — Annual General Meeting

0:00 Good afternoon, and welcome to the HELIX EXPLORATION PLC annual general meeting. I'd now like to hand you over to the management board from HELIX EXPLORATION. Good afternoon. Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Keith Spickelmeier. I'm the chairman of HELIX. I'd to welcome all of you and the guests to our annual general meeting. Thanks for taking the time to be here with us today. With us are my fellow directors, Bo Sears, Brian Meats, and through the communications, Greg Peters. I wanna confirm that we have a quorum present, and, therefore, I declare the meeting fully constituted and open.

0:49 I now seek the permission of the shareholders to proceed with the business of today. If there aren't any objections, we will proceed. Before we proceed with the voting on the particular resolutions, I'd like to invite any questions that are being proposed. Please raise them now, and we'll address them. Thank you. We'll now move to the results for each resolution. Voting will be conducted by a show of hands. Shareholders wishing to vote in favor or against the resolution, please raise your hand accordingly. K. No hands being raised. The proxy results received ahead of the AGM will be announced in percentage terms, and more detailed figures can be obtained from the company secretary upon request.

1:38 Resolution one, to receive the company's annual report and accounts for the year ended 09/30/2025. The proxy results are as follows. Votes in favor, 99.92%. Votes against, eight tenths per percent. Point 28% votes were withheld. I declare the resolution carried as an ordinary resolution. Resolution two, that Beau Sears be appointed as a director of the company. The proxy results are as follows. Votes in favor, a 100%. Votes against, none. Point 2% of the votes were withheld. I declare the resolution carried as an ordinary resolution. Resolution three, that Keith Spickelmeier be appointed as the director of the company. Proxy results are as follows. Votes in favor, 99.68.

2:28 Votes against, point 32%. Point 2% votes were withheld. I declare the resolution carried as an ordinary resolution. Resolution four, that Ryan needs to be reappointed as a director of the company. Proxy results are as follows. Votes in favor, 100%. Votes against, zero. Point 41% votes were withheld. I declare the resolution carried as an earlier resolution. Resolution five, that Greg Peters be appointed as a director of the company. The proxy results are as follows, 100% in favor, none against, point 41% were withheld. I declare the resolution carried as an ordinary resolution. Resolution six, the Crescent Reeves LLP be appointed as the company's auditors to hold office from the conclusion of this meeting until the conclusion of the next meeting at which the accounts are laid before the company.

3:21 The proxy results are as follows. Votes in favor, 100%. Votes against, 9.24% votes were withheld. I declare the resolution carried as an ordinary resolution. Resolution seven, to authorize directors to determine the auditor's compensation. The proxy results are as follows. Votes in favor, 98.39%. Votes against 1.61%. Point 11% votes were withheld. I declare the resolution carried as an ordinary resolution. Resolution eight, that the directors be authorized to allot shares. Further details can be found within the notice of the AGM. The proxy results are as follows. Votes in favor, 93.24%.

4:07 Votes against 6.72%. Point 55% votes were withheld. I declare the resolution carried as an ordinary resolution. That the directors be authorized to waive preemption rights. Further details can be found within the notice of the AGM. Proxy results are as follows. Votes in favor, 91.36%. Votes against, 8.64%. Point 62% votes were withheld. I declare the resolution carried as a special resolution. This concludes our formal business for today. Again, thanks for being here, and I'll pass this over to Bo to give a brief, presentation summarizing the achievements of HELIX this year, and there'll be a q and a session afterwards. Alright.

5:17 So that's what's presenting online. So hit that? Yeah. So that's what's presenting online. Sorry, everyone. Just tell us Hit. Ah, you can see those. There you go. Was but look. It's not showing up there. Yes. I'm aware of that. You might just just need to well, if you wanna talk oh, one minute. Is this okay. So it's not working? Yeah. So just sort of there you go. So that's, yeah, that's what's Yeah. But you're not gonna be able to see that. There we go. There we go. Okay. So you'll just you may just scroll. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Thanks everybody for coming. Really appreciate you being here on what you all caught as a very hot day. This is almost nothing where I come from, but I appreciate y'all coming.

6:09 I have a particular aversion to reading off of PowerPoint presentation, so I'll just kinda more talk over these things, but the general theme is here. So just to highlight some of our milestones, I I think everybody is aware of what we've done, and how we've done over the past two years. It's incredible. The team we have in Montana from drilling to workovers to, plant fabrication to everything. It's it's it's we couldn't be happier with everyone involved in making all of the things happen. So, you know, from from our inception, to, you know, the beginning of 2025, we've progressed a lot. So the the the the well, we it has flows. We wanted to get some science behind that particular project.

7:04 We got the science out of it. We are reentering the well right now. The final PSA equipment, pressure swing adsorption. That plant is installed, operational. It's a beautiful plant. You know, it's it's really quite impressive, and we have some pictures of the plant that we'll show here in a minute. We have a a tube trailer, you know, on-site that is you know, that we're in the process of of filling that now. First gas production, you know, that's what we all want to do. It's it's very difficult. I've I've been in the helium exploration space for twenty six years now, and so I've learned a lot from, you know, things in the past. And and, you know, getting to where we are in such a short period of time is actually a pretty incredible thing that we've accomplished. I'm not patting myself on the back. It's more of a team effort, but we're really quite excited.

7:59 When we drilled the well, we drilled deeper into the into the Precambrian formation because we knew we were sitting in a in a prime environment for hydrogen geological hydrogen because all the all the geological conditions exist for it to be there. Sure enough, it was there. So with the information that we were able to extract from our drilling operations, we have a partnership with the United States Air Force and the Chimera Fund for the pursuit of geological hydrogen in the deeper depths. Now whether that be flowing geological hydrogen or stimulated geological hydrogen, that's the that's the open question. That's what we're working with them, with. First off, take agreement. This is very exciting for us.

8:46 As everyone is aware, we have the this Iranian conflict going on. Sorry. Apologies, everyone. The the the closure of the Strait Of Hormuz obviously has hindered supply. And so, you know, with that is an is an opportunity for us to really take advantage of some spot pricing. So, you know, long term agreements are readily available, but, you know, we might as well take advantage of some of these higher pricing in the spot market. It it's, you know, for the benefit of our shareholders, clearly. Yep. Alright. So these are just some pictures of the plant. This is in various stages of Two seconds.

9:32 Yep. I think that we matched up online. Sorry. You know, various stages of completion. This is the building that we have installed to house this. Need buildings over this. Obviously, this is in Northern Montana. It's quite cold, very windy in other parts of country. This is the helium PSA here. These beds these are the helium beds that purify the helium. It's a ZBEC plant. This was an actual operational plant in Kansas that that we picked up for, you know, $500,000. It was a used plant, but it was a a high purity helium plant that we were able to get at such a great bark. These are more pictures of the you know, here's the compressor here, you know, control panels to control everything. Everything is remote in this plant, so we can operate it from our computers.

10:22 This is a this is where you fill the gas goes from the plant here. This is where you fill the tube trenches. And that's where you have these tanks of trailers done back into it. And then here's another that's Aaron. Lucky to have him, and he's kinda showing everybody the schematics of the plant in this thing. It's a process. It really is getting there. Okay. State of the helium market today. It's no surprise we are in a, unique position. We are in the fifth shortage in less than twenty years.

11:09 There's always gonna be a shortage. You can almost count on it. Right? It just it's it's almost a cycle. The problem is is that most of the helium internationally comes from geopolitically sensitive areas, and Qatar being one of those areas. So with the closure of the Strait Of Hormuz, that's 30 to 35% of the global supply of helium off the market off the top. So that has had severe adverse consequences to helium end users. The companies that that take from, take helium from that plant, they are, issuing force majeure letters. So people are unable to get their Helium, or at least they're getting allocated, you know, depending on how important they are.

11:55 So for instance, the the the big users, Intel, Siemens, those guys generally get the high volume product, but then you go all the way down the totem pole of helium usage. The balloon guys get far less, if any at all. So that's where the spot market really comes in because the people who are severely, adversely affected, you know, need helium. Because without helium, plants can't run. Fiber optics cannot be manufactured. Chips can't be manufactured. MRI machines don't work. It's it is without helium, we are actually living in the stone age. So we don't we don't have a crystal ball on what's gonna happen with this rate of hormones, but it doesn't appear to be getting any better in the short term.

12:44 But even with when it's when even when it is opened again, there's going to be a delay because it takes time for the boats to get there, the ISO containers. It takes time to fill it up, and then it takes time to get the helium back to the the end users or the distributors or whatever. So even if this is fixed, there's going to be a three or four month lag in helium supplies. Now there are a lot of a lot of Helium end users who kinda prepare. They're they're used to these kinda shortages. So some of these companies have gaseous storage on-site, and they're running through that storage right now. They're seeing a need for more helium in the future, but you can only store it in gaseous form. So if it's on a liquid container and it's stuck at sea, the helium's gonna vent off into into vapor and just be lost forever.

13:40 So there's no way that's the interesting thing about helium. It's a just in time just in time inventory product. So once you produce it, you gotta use it. Now those ISO containers can only travel, what is it? Forty five days? Forty five days. I'm not reading off it anyway. Yeah. Exactly. Forty five days before they start boiling off. Okay. So I'm gonna go to the next. Your head? You wanna get on the mic? Yeah. Right there. Yep. Okay. So this is basically a slide of what we are aiming to do. This one, I'll kinda read out a bit.

14:30 We want to capitalize on what's going on right now. You know? It's it's so does everybody else. It's it's a it's a good time to be in the healing business. There's no doubt about it. There are just some some customers out there who are just in dire need of of helium when they need it. So, you know, we want to be a contributor in that ecosystem. As far as inner inner industry disruption, you know, the goal of any HELIX EXPLORATION is to be somewhat, you know, vertically integrated or, you know, we want we want to really control our own destiny, so to speak, so that anything that we do from from the drilling all the way to the end, we wanna have some control over over these aspects.

15:17 We are in a unique place because we are a producer to to pursue other opportunities, and so we are pursuing those right now. Strategic partnerships as well. Lots of opportunity out there, and we're exploring all of them. You go to the next? Yeah. Is that it? Yep. Oh, that's it. There you go. So unless you want to touch on anything else quickly, we can go into the q and a. Yeah. It's q and a. Yep. Sure. Alright. Thank you, both. We'll just jump into a few q and a. We've had some questions submitted online, so we're probably gonna take one from online. We'll take one from the room and vice versa for so like that for a couple rounds to see how we get.

16:05 So first question. And so I thought they were gonna appear there. They're not. Would you help me to read them, Bill? You happy to read it? No. I've read it. Cool. That's that one. This one? Yep. It's up. Okay. Question number one. How many wells are planned for the remainder of '26? What what is the cost per well at current actuals, and what is the funding mechanism, existing cash, debt, or further equity?

16:52 We wanna drill as many wells as as humanly possible. I mean, of course. I mean, that's why we're in the game. We're a helium explorer. We have off take now, so we want to grow organically. We wanna use cash flows to drill more wells. That has always been the primary goal. But there are there are things to consider no matter where you drill on a planet Earth. You have rig availability issues. You have crew issues, and that that is mobilization availability. In this part of Montana, we have, you know, weather constraints. There's, you know, certain you you just don't wanna drill in the in the winter months up here. It costs a lot more because you had to put a lot of boilers in place. You know, people can really suffer in these extreme cold temperatures in the, in the winter. So, you know, we we look at all opportunities for for rapid expansion, and, you know, we we look at all options on the table. But, you know, whole point is we want to drill as quickly as possible.

17:56 Yes. Probably take a question from the floor if there's any before we can continue with the online person. Just, you know, just sorry about the phone. Yeah. No worries. Do you have any prospects of of of having the resource updates from independent resource updates? You know, most resource companies will do maybe twelve months again, independent companies in along those lines. Yes. Now, you know, with we have our initial resource assessment. We want to get more wells drilled before, and not many companies have updated their resource report after each well. So and the reason why is we're batting a thousand.

18:43 Like, to y'all use that kind of analogy. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. I understand. Think Yeah. Yeah. Well, means every at bat, we we we hit make a hit, I guess. Does that make sense? Okay. So we know the resource is there. We're having good luck. We know the structure is there because it's been defined by seismic and and gravity and aeromag and and everything else. So the structure is quite large. It spans two townships, and each well will drain, you know, 640 acres. So, you know, when we drill more wells, we will get a more thorough that that expands across the entire field as opposed to, say, the Northern the Northern Dome and the Middle Dome. But you've got no plans to do it on a sort of annual basis? Or On a per well basis. I mean, like Per well. When we drill x amount of wells, we'll get another one down. Not not many companies do it just by the end of the year.

19:45 So take one off. Take one here. Let me see. A bit of a long question. Sorry. This one? Yeah. Let me go with that one. That's Oh oh, this one. That's a queue. Sorry. Question. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So which one? Yeah. I think we can go with that one. Okay. It's quite a long question. Sorry. What is that noise? It's a track. Oh, you can summarize the question. Right. Let the me just the first one. Okay. The question this is a Let me just summarize it. Yeah. Well, I I have to read it to summarize it. Looking further ahead, gaseous helium and liquid helium command materially materially different price points in the market as production builds toward the capacity of the existing processing infrastructure. Has the board given consideration to routes by which the company might access liquid helium pricing, whether through toll liquefaction arrangements or with third party facilities, commercial relationships with helium trading companies, or otherwise.

20:42 What are steps, requirements? I recognize these are forward looking statements. Blah blah blah. Okay. Yeah. So liquefaction. It it's a good question because every explorer, the endgame should be the pursuit of liquefaction. All the molecules that get moved all over the world today come from liquefaction plants. Qatar, Wyoming, Algeria, Russia. Right? That's it's how helium has moved all over the globe. So when you and the reason why is because you can put you can haul a lot more liquid than you can gas. So if a gaseous tube trailer contains, say, a 160,000 cubic feet, a liquid container can haul about a million cubic feet.

21:36 So that's what makes it logistically preferable if you're moving it all over the world or moving it inside of a country. So we you know, it it's something we have an eye on at all times. It's something that we're we're monitoring closely, and it's obviously gonna be everybody's objective to have some sort of liquefaction capacity, unless anybody has a follow-up on the liquefaction. I think it's probably enough unless you really want to kick on. Do you wanna touch on that one? Well, does anybody have one from here? Yeah. Any from the floor? No. I think probably Okay. Communications have been pulled back to manage expectations. Can they commit to a regular investor update schedule going forward quarterly at a minimum, so shareholders aren't reliant on forum speculation?

22:31 So this year, we've we've issued 16 r and s's, eight of which are operational. So and we're not even at the end of q two. So, you know, maybe the spacing maybe the question is relating to spacing in between the two, but we're not going to release, you know, frivolous stuff just to keep it to keep the spacing amount. We want to issue RNSs when we have something substantial to report. You know, if there's a rig delay, we don't think that that requires an RNS. We want actionable items, and and we hope that that's, expected of us. Right? We don't wanna waste anybody's time. We want to issue real results, with real outcomes.

23:20 Okay. I'm at the gate. Yep. Any more questions at all? Okay then. Thanks, Bo. Guess short and sweet, I now declare the meeting closed. Thanks everybody for being here. We're gonna hang around for a while. If anybody has any follow-up questions, we're here to here to address them. Thank you. That's great. Thank you for update updating attendees today. Can I please ask attendees not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations? This may take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the board of HELIX EXPLORATION PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's annual general meeting, and good afternoon to you all.