“A dream. It’s perfect”: Helium discovery in northern Minnesota may be biggest ever in North America::For a century, the U.S. Government-owned the largest helium reserve in the country, but the biggest exporters now are in Russia, Qatar and Tanzania. With this new discovery, Minnesota could be joining that list.
Hopefully we stop wasting this limited resource on fucking balloons.
Edit: well this kicked off a fun and respectful conversation. The information I can find from actual scientists says wasting helium on balloons is bad. The balloon lobby says it is just a waste byproduct. The balloon lobby brings nothing of value to the world in terms of plastic or helium use, so I’m going to go with the science opinion on this one.
The helium used for balloons is of low purity.
The shortages you hear about are of pure or near pure helium. The stuff going into the balloons at Tommy’s birthday party isn’t the same thing used to cool superconductors.
EDIT: And I used to think Reddit was full of ignorant jackasses …
This is like saying gold nuggets are worthless because people want refined products made of gold…
It’s fucking helium bro, it’s easy to separate it from anything else. Because it’s the lightest noble gas…
Fill a balloon with 10% helium and 90% atmosphere, and the top 10% of the balloon is pure helium.
That’s how easy it is to sepeeate it.
it’s much more complicated than that, and the most useful property of helium is its low boiling point. it goes like this:
first, you start with natural gas that has some nitrogen, some water, some helium, some carbon dioxide, heavier hydrocarbons, thiols, dust, and such. mechanical filtering gets rid of dust and mist, water, carbon dioxide and thiols are removed chemically, heavier hydrocarbons are removed on active carbon. now we have mix of methane, ethane, hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, traces of carbon monoxide, dioxide and water. this all is cooled down, first just to freeze out these trace amounts of water and carbon dioxide, then to liquefy what is left.
next this liquid mixture is put through massive distillation tower, allowing for separation of mainly nitrogen and methane. this nitrogen and methane are end products, some are sold as liquids but most are regasified in order to cool down incoming gas and save some energy. another product is helium concentrate, at this point it can be 50% to 80% with rest being nitrogen but this depends on exact facility.
then, some extra air is added to helium concentrate, it’s heated up and passed over catalyst bed. this is done in order to burn out hydrogen and any hydrocarbons, because separating oxygen from helium is much easier than separating hydrogen from helium. products of this burn are water and carbon dioxide that can be separated chemically. then again it’s all cooled down, nitrogen and oxygen are liquefied, then it’s all cooled down further and from some 30K on it’s just helium being circulated as gas because you can’t liquefy it like any other gases, it needs a special process. on every pass, with extensive recycling of heat some part of it is liquified and this is the final output, 5N liquid helium.
at least that’s how it works in a facility built in 70s in then eastern block. now it supplies half of europe and a research facility situated nearby. i suspect it was built with at least some military applications in mind during this time, namely helium is used for pressurizing hydrogen tanks of rockets, but also soviets toyed with an idea of using gas lasers militarily. this requires a supply of helium, and a supply of neon is also a nice thing to have in this situation. neon was produced in Azovstal cryogenic oxygen factory serving nearby steelworks, as it can be separated from air. it ended up providing virtually all neon for semiconductor manufacturing in the world, but from what i understand there are alternative suppliers by now
it’s much more complicated than that
But compared to extracting other gases (which virtually all of them aren’t finite) it is that easy
it’s pretty fucking hard. only six countries in the world produce helium, and you get engineering challenges that don’t exist anywhere else. for example you can’t use any grease on helium turbine bearings in the lower temperature stages because all of them freeze, so the solution is to use gas lubricated bearings. this is some serious precision engineering that has to work in extreme conditions
it’s also hard because the simpler way of liquefying gases, like the one used for nitrogen that uses no moving parts in the coldest part, fails for helium, this makes liquefying helium harder than any other gas. it’s also hard because of limited availability. it’s hard because of massive capital costs and lots of custom machinery. it’s hard because of scale required. about any other compound can be manufactured without at least some of these problems
Rare finite resources aren’t refined in a lot of places…
It’s a gas. It’s effectively defined by the fact that the individual particles have too much energy to settle like that.
Separating a lot of liquids has similar issues though.
It’s a noble gas…
It’s the lightest noble gas…
Noble gas means it doesn’t chemically react.
It doesn’t mean you can easily separate it from a bunch of other gases in the same space.
It doesn’t mean you can easily separate it from a bunch of other gases in the same space
When it’s the lightest noble gas it does…
When literally the only lighter gas is hydrogen, which combines easily with oxygen to produce a liquid, it becomes pretty fucking easy.
Seriously, you couldn’t ask for an easier gas to separate.
You understand how much these companies could make if they were capable of purifying the helium further to sell to all the places that desperately need pure helium?
They have loads of resources and haven’t figured it out, because it’s nowhere near as easy as you’re pretending. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
You’re incorrect, but at least you’re incorrect confidently, I guess.
Here’s a link where a helium extractor explains the process:
https://rockymountainair.com/blog/how-is-helium-extracted/
It’s a lot more complicated than “let it sit in a tank, bro. Trust me, bro”.
Well, when someone is having difficulty understanding something, people tend to dumb it down, hopefully to the point the other person finally understands.
Unfortunately sometimes that’s not possible, in the worse cases the idiot starts acting like you’re not specific enough and that’s the problem.
That’s like the universal sign it’s a waste of time.
wdym by “low purity” helium, helium that has been purified cryogenically is easily 99.999% if not better, and this is the main process used worldwide iirc
The highest grade helium is grade 6, grade 4.7 gets used for cryogenic purposes. Balloon helium is grade 4.
Tommy’s dad didn’t steal grade 6 helium from a research lab for kid’s birthday party.
Here’s a link to a gas supplier’s website with a chart: https://www.westairgases.com/blog/exploring-the-most-essential-and-underappreciated-uses-for-helium
Here’s a link to a gas supplier’s website
Lol…
Here’s the people lobbying to sell as much as possible because of capitalism!
Do you link British Petroleum’s website when people talk about how bad climate change is?
Don’t you think the people selling it would want to sell it at the higher medical grade price than to fucking Dollar Tree one bottle at time? Given the choice they would provide it for medical use.
It’s not about total revenue, it’s profit margin…
If medical grade sells for $1k/unit, and balloon sells for $10/unit, but it costs $1k/unit to refine…
They’re gonna want to sell it for balloons.
Because while it’s essentially a finate resource, on a capitalist timescale there’s a lot.
They’re fine fucking over the people 500 years from now, because they get rich now.
Which is why I keep using the example of the fossil fuel industry.
Capitalists care about their own capital, not future society generations from now.
This is actually incredibly good news
Not really, because we’re still pissing away invaluable helium because of capitalism…
If we keep doing that, it doesn’t really matter how much we find.
We need to stop wasting it first, then finding huge supplies is a good thing. As long as we’re not dumb enough to start wasting it again.
Ah yes, we’re wasting helium, so finding more isn’t a good thing. Of course. 🙄
Imagine we found out climate change predictions were a decade early, so we kept pace and didn’t use the extra time to try and fix it…
It’s not bad news that we got another decade, but it doesn’t matter that much in the long run if we still don’t fix the underlying issue
Yeah it’ll hopefully see us through to when we’re collecting it in space - there’s plenty up there and they’ve already come up with some good ways of collecting it
How are we wasting it? Keep in mind that the helium used for stuff like balloons is not the same as the helium used in medical equipment. Also keep in mind that even if it were, the amount of helium used in balloons would be less than 1% of total usage.
So I ask again, how are we wasting it?
Tldr:
It takes an insanely large timescale for it to be produced on Earth, and it rarely accumulates because it’s fucking helium. It’s so light that it will literally just float out into outer space as soon as it’s vented to the atmosphere.
Using any for nonessential purposes is a waste.
