Durell Johnson is a natural gas engineer who can’t seem to stay away from helium. He started his career with Exxon as a reservoir engineer but soon found his passion for natural gas processing and later held senior positions in the midstream industry, including VP of engineering for Regency Energy Partners and senior VP of engineering and operations at Stakeholder Midstream.

As a process engineer for Union Pacific Resources in the 1990’s, Mr. Johnson was in the conference room when the concept to build a helium plant near the Colorado-Kansas border was first conceived. He served as the Ladder Creek Helium Plant’s project engineer, project manager and operations director from 1997 to 1999. Mr. Johnson managed the design and construction of the new plant, hired and trained its employees, commissioned the plant and managed operations until it was sold to DCP Midstream in 1999. That’s when he said goodbye to helium. Or so he thought.

His early experience extracting, purifying, liquefying and selling helium had set the hook, and in 2019 Mr. Johnson founded Tumbleweed Midstream to acquire the Ladder Creek Helium Plant and Gathering System—the same plant he helped commission 20 years earlier. The reunion has been quite satisfying.

Since Tumbleweed took over Ladder Creek, the plant has experienced a very significant increase in helium production making Ladder Creek the fastest growing supply of new helium in North America.