Rift Helium AIM:RIFT
I've been looking at this one for a couple weeks and thought I'd summarise my notes since I haven't seen much chat about it on here. Not financial advice (obviously!). Interested to hear your thoughts.
State of play
Rift Helium IPO'd on AIM in mid-April at 10p, raised £8.1m. Market cap around £13m at issue. They're a pure-play helium explorer with one big asset — the Upepo Project. This comprises of 283 km² across three prospecting licences in Tanzania's Rukwa Basin.
Rukwa Basin is the same geological feature that Helium One has an active drilling licence for proven helium reserves. Helium One is concentrated in the southern Rukwa. The Tai and Itumbula West wells are here, and where their newly activated 480 km² mining licence (Songwe Helium JV) sits.
Timing
If you haven't been paying attention to the helium market since the Iran/Qatar thing kicked off in Feb:
QatarEnergy's Ras Laffan facility — roughly a third of global helium supply — got hit by Iranian strikes and declared force majeure on March 02 2026
Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to Western shipping, so even what Qatar can produce can't easily get out
Spot helium prices up 70–100%, contract prices are up 20–40% on renegotiation
Airgas declared force majeure on US shipments mid-March
This is the 5th helium shortage since 2006 and the structural one — AI/semiconductor demand was already growing \~10% YoY before the war
Helium is non-substitutable for EUV lithography, wafer cooling, MRI, and the helium-sealed HDDs that every hyperscaler is buying. TSMC, ASML, Samsung — they all need it. There is no synthetic helium suitable for these functions. You either find it in the ground or you don't have it.
Why Tanzania
This is the bit that I believe the market potentially hasn't fully priced. Rukwa Basin helium is:
Primary helium — not a by-product of LNG like Qatar. The economics are completely different when helium is your product, not a 0.04% impurity you skim off methane.
Outside the Strait of Hormuz — Indian Ocean export, no Iranian chokepoint risk. In a world where buyers are paying premiums for supply security, "African helium" is suddenly more appetising.
High concentrations — historical samples in the basin have shown He concentrations well above commercial threshold (commercial is 0.3%; some Rukwa samples are multiples of that).
Where the £8m goes:
This is the bit retail always glosses over but it matters. The raise is sized for:
3D seismic on Upepo (the near-term catalyst — this is what you're buying at this stage)
Lead-up to drill targeting
G&A through the work programme
Stage one for shareholders is the 3D seismic result. That's the binary read. If the seismic looks positive, you get a derisking re-rate before a single hole is drilled.
Management
Charlie FitzRoy is running it — he's been on the AIM junior-explorer journey before and knows how to feed the story to the market between catalysts. That sounds cynical but on AIM it genuinely matters; plenty of decent assets have died i silence because nobody could effectively communicate the work programme and what the pipeline (excuse the pun) to production looks like.
Why I think the risk/reward works
£13m market cap on a pre-drill explorer in a commodity where the spot price has doubled and the world's #2 supplier just went offline. Compare that to where Helium One traded at peak hype on similar-stage Rukwa ground — multiples higher. A competent seismic programme on a known route to production during the tightest helium market in 20 years gives me some confidence in an investment in this stock.
The risks
Pre-revenue explorer. They might find nothing. Drilling is 12+ months out.
If Qatar comes back online faster than expected, the macro tailwind softens fast. Nobody knows how US-Israel/ Iran conflict will play out. But will this conflict drive a need for diversification away from the Gulf?
AIM micro-caps drift between catalysts — you'd expect it to fall if newsflow goes quiet.
They will need to raise again before first gas, almost certainly. Dilution is part of this trade.
Tanzania jurisdiction risk is real, even if it's been a pretty stable mining/exploration jurisdiction.
TLDR
Pure-play AIM helium explorer, £13m cap, fresh £8m in the bank, primary helium asset in a proven basin, listing into the worst helium supply shock of the decade with a clean near-term catalyst (3D seismic). Speculative as hell. I'm not in yet but considering and watching closely.
Refs:
Rift Helium "Intention to Float" RNS (April 8 2026)
Rift Helium official site —rifthelium.com/about
Karoo Group geology
Wopfner, H. (2002), "Tectonic and climatic events controlling deposition in Tanzanian Karoo basins," Journal of African Earth Sciences — the standard reference for Karoo stratigraphy across Tanzanian rift basins.
Kreuser, T. et al. (1990), "Depositional evolution of Permo-Triassic Karoo basins in Tanzania,"
Catuneanu, O. et al. (2005), "The Karoo basins of south-central Africa," Journal of African Earth Sciences 43, 211–253 — basin-by-basin synthesis covering tectonic vs climatic controls, Dwyka-through-Stormberg stratigraphy.
Roberts, E.M. et al., "The Red Sandstone Group (RSG) in the Rukwa Rift Basin"
Morley, C.K. et al. (1999), "Geoscience of Rift Systems – Evolution of East Africa," AAPG Studies in Geology 44 — covers the Karoo-age rifting precursor to the modern East African Rift, including Rukwa-specific structure.
GeoExpro (Sept 2024), "Helium One's bumpy road to success"
geoexpro.com/helium-ones-bumpy-road-to-success
sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/karoo-supergroup