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Helium and CO2 shortage issues

I've been having a bitch of a time getting it from all my local suppliers. Strict rationing. They'll only give me a bottle at a time for $$$$

I tig weld a lot of thick aluminum. Seems like my only option is to spring for a Dynasty 800 now.
 
bigun said:
Is this truely a shortage or another lets make money by driving the price up by speculators?
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I’ve been hearing for 20 years there’s only a finite amount of helium in the world and not tons of it. I haven’t read the articles, but I understand Russia produces most of it.
 
“The two most important sources of helium in the United States are the Hugoton-Panhandle field complex, which is located in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and ExxonMobil's LaBarge field, which is located in the Riley Ridge area of southwestern Wyoming.”

The supply really hasn’t changed since the mid 80s when these fields were first drilled.
The demand has.

Very few gas field in the world have have commercial quantities of helium and those that do have large quantities of H2S to go along with that helium.
It takes a major producer with a major investment to get into helium extraction from well head gas.
 
I recall the helium thing started back in about 2011 or 2012. Restaurant I worked for at the time did helium tanks regularly to fill balloons. Round then west air stopped swapping our tanks out and we just weren’t able to get the stuff anymore as they had earmarked whatever they were getting for priority customers in the medical field with MRI machines and the like. For a while we would go to party city and purchase their shit small tanks but even they started having issues getting them. So we just killed the balloons all together.
 
IGT said:
“The two most important sources of helium in the United States are the Hugoton-Panhandle field complex, which is located in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and ExxonMobil's LaBarge field, which is located in the Riley Ridge area of southwestern Wyoming.”

The supply really hasn’t changed since the mid 80s when these fields were first drilled.
The demand has.

Very few gas field in the world have have commercial quantities of helium and those that do have large quantities of H2S to go along with that helium.
It takes a major producer with a major investment to get into helium extraction from well head gas.
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I’m no expert, but it also seems like it’s more common in dry gas. Since everyone drills more for oil now, and most gas produced is associated gas in an oil play, we’re not seeing as much contribution from dry gas plays.
 
So, since the impending shortage has been known about and discussed for several years. Has any attempt been made to develop alternative methods and/or equipment or is everyone waiting until it’s an emergency?
 
Helium has been a pain to locate for a few years now. The oil field SAT diving boats I work on generally carry 50k cu/ft of helium. That gets spendy.
 
Tin Roof said:
So, since the impending shortage has been known about and discussed for several years. Has any attempt been made to develop alternative methods and/or equipment or is everyone waiting until it’s an emergency?
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It must not be profitable enough yet.
Another helium plant tried to go online in Western Wyoming in the last 10 years. I would say 300 million dollar investment.
They didn't make it.

See my above post about major players and major investment.
 
WESTOF7 said:
I've been having a bitch of a time getting it from all my local suppliers. Strict rationing. They'll only give me a bottle at a time for $$$$

I tig weld a lot of thick aluminum. Seems like my only option is to spring for a Dynasty 800 now.
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where's "frozen wasteland" at? got a couple 330s I'd trade you for money or whatever
I'm happy enough just burning straight argon
 
I work in a semiconductor research lab and there has been a big push the last few years to get away from helium as a process/purge gas due to cost and availability. A few months back someone bumped the wrong valve and sent a few hundred thousand worth to atmosphere. Whoops.
 
I work in Aerospace research. No shortage for us. :lmao:. We are now implementing massive investment in helium recovery for facilities. Something to be said for that. And it is absolutely critical to flight research and space development. Time to invest.
 
j_mazala said:
I work in a semiconductor research lab and there has been a big push the last few years to get away from helium as a process/purge gas due to cost and availability. A few months back someone bumped the wrong valve and sent a few hundred thousand worth to atmosphere. Whoops.
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The big thing with He is it's very STABLE over a massive temp range. It's reaction to temp changes over about 800° F, make it very desirable for many industries.
 
1Sinner said:
I work in Aerospace research. No shortage for us. :lmao:. We are now implementing massive investment in helium recovery for facilities. Something to be said for that. And it is absolutely critical to flight research and space development. Time to invest.
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PM me
 
[486] said:
I've got a couple 330s I'd let go for that, but I'm pretty sure it is welder grade, prolly like 99.5% or whatever.

Hell, I'd probably even drive them down to texas.
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If they were 99.999%, I'd take you up on that. Anybody has any laying around, I'll give $500 each and give you the bottle back when they're dead.
 
They had the "helium shortage" on whatever news channel my folks have on. Of course, it's all Russia's fault
 
OK...once upon a time the US was the largest holder of He (Helium for the non chemist types) reserves mostly found in conjunction with oil and mostly found in TX (explains why some texans are a bit light headed).

A reserve this type can only last so long because He is an inert gas (doesn't combine with anything) and can only be manufactured via fusion reactions involving heavy hydrogen (both Deuterium and tritium) and a bit hazardous currently.

Its has been common knowledge that the reserves would eventually reduce by the scientific types and anyone in the compressed gas pedaling biz. 1st heard about it in the 1980s and later on but no one was particularly concerned at the time.

I found out how serious it was in 2015 because I used He as a leak testing tracer gas and was being yelled at by the accounting folks about the bottle costs (T size bottles ~300 cf) which was required by production that all coating equipment be Mass Spec. Leak tested weekly...translated to about 1 bottle a month of "balloon grade" He use.

Saving grace in this is that most gas peddlers sell a dry air/He mix and one can correct for the volume change if one knows the mix. Doesn't help with the dilemma but frankly it's not going to get better given the issue to manufacture the stuff.
 
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[486] said:
thus why we gotta get into SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE
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Catch all those balloons that got away?

balloons-against-clear-sky-112510015-5766b88d5f9b58346a9b9c1f_jpg_75.jpg
 
And from the article for the above pic:

Updated on August 27, 2019

Helium is the second-lightest element. Although it is rare on Earth, you likely have encountered it in helium-filled balloons. It's the most widely used of the inert gases, utilized in arc welding, diving, growing silicon crystals, and as a coolant in MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners.

In addition to being rare, helium is (mostly) not a renewable resource. The helium that we have was produced by the radioactive decay of rock, long ago. Over the span of hundreds of millions of years, the gas accumulated and was released by tectonic plate movement, where it found its way into natural gas deposits and as a dissolved gas in groundwater. Once the gas leaks into the atmosphere, it is light enough to escape the Earth's gravitational field so it bleeds off into space, never to return. We may run out of helium within 25–30 years because it's being consumed so freely.


Why We Could Run out of Helium​

Why would such a valuable resource be squandered? Basically, it's because the price of helium does not reflect its value. Most of the world's supply of helium is held by the United States National Helium Reserve, which was mandated to sell off all of its stockpile by 2015, regardless of price. This was based on a 1996 law, the Helium Privatization Act, which was intended to help the government recoup the cost of building up the reserve. Though the uses of helium multiplied, the law had not been revisited, so by 2013 much of the planet's stockpile of helium was sold at an extremely low price.

In 2013, the U.S. Congress did re-examine the law, ultimately passing a bill, the Helium Stewardship Act, aimed at maintaining the helium reserves.


There's More Helium Than We Once Thought​

Recent research indicates there's more helium, particularly in groundwater, than scientists previously estimated. Also, although the process is extremely slow, ongoing radioactive decay of natural uranium and other radioisotopes does generate additional helium. That's the good news. The bad news is that it will require more money and new technology to recover the element. The other bad news is that there isn't going to be helium that we can get from the planets near us because those planets also exert too little gravity to hold the gas. Perhaps at some point, we may find a way to "mine" the element from gas giants further out in the solar system.


Why We Aren't Running out of Hydrogen​

If helium is so lightweight that it escapes Earth's gravity, you may be wondering about whether we may run out of hydrogen. Even though hydrogen forms chemical bonds with itself to make H2 gas, it's still lighter than even one helium atom. The reason we will not run out is that hydrogen forms bonds with other atoms besides itself. The element is bound into water molecules and organic compounds. Helium, on the other hand, is a noble gas with a stable electron shell structure. Since it doesn't form chemical bonds, it isn't preserved in compounds.
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ThePanzerFuhrer said:
Mine the moon it has tons of helium on it .
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www.resilience.org

Another extraordinary delusion: Mining helium from the Moon

The obsession with mining the Moon strikes me as the kind of fantasy that enters into civilizations when they are faced with huge, seemingly insurmountable problems—climate change and resource depletion come to mind—and they want magical solutions that allow them to forego having actually to...
www.resilience.org www.resilience.org
I’m not saying it isn’t possible to get helium-3 or other resources from the Moon. Clearly, humans can retrieve things from the Moon as they have already during missions by humans and probes. It is the cost of doing so which ought to warn us that such schemes are unlikely to succeed.

We have examples of similar challenges right here on Earth. There is somewhere between 45,000 and 1.5 million tons of gold in the Earth’s oceans. But the gold is so diffuse that the cost of extracting it is far above the price of gold.

Likewise, the cost of bringing helium-3 from the Moon would be colossal for reasons of distance and low concentration. Concentrations are believed to be around 20 to 30 parts per billion in the lunar soil called “regolith.”
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I don't know what 20-30 PPB really adds up to...

For comparison:
Iron is a commonly occurring metallic element, comprising 4.6% of igneous rocks and 4.4% of
sedimentary rocks (Morel and Hering, 1993). The typical iron concentrations in soils range from
0.2% to 55%
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www.convert-me.com

Convert Parts Per Billion (ppb) to Percent (%), Percentages And Parts

Online conversion from Parts Per Billion (ppb) to Percent (%), Percentages And Parts. Fractions And Percentage Converter.
www.convert-me.com www.convert-me.com

30 PPB = 0.000003%
 
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