“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 …
Balloon helium is 3% helium. So every 33 balloons is one Balloon worth of pure helium. No helium starts off pure. It all gets concentrated/separated to get that way. “Balloon grade” helium can be concentrated just fine and considering that thousands of those balloons are filled every day, it is a lot of wasted helium.
*I had my percentage swapped, it seems. Balloon helium is 97% helium.
balloon helium has some air in it, it’s still 90%+ helium, probably
Oh. I had that totally bass akward.
depends on manufacturer, some state it’s just 50%
One of the things I read said it has to be at least 93% to make balloons float.
i’ve took time to actually look up various manufacturers’ datasheets and it’s: range 50-99%, 95%, 97%, range 95-100%, 99%, unspecified or just data for pure helium. at this point i’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as “balloon gas manufacturer”, everyone buys 4N+ cryogenic helium and balloon gas consists of odds and ends that come from flushing piping and empty bottles with better stuff
how much do you need to float, if it’s helium then 1L lifts about 1g of mass, if it’s 50% helium 50% air it lifts 0.5g per liter, then it depends on how heavy balloon is in relation to its volume
The balloon + helium has to be lighter than the (couple of liters of) air it displaces.
He Density (at STP) 0.1786 g/L
The density of air at sea level is about 1.2 g/L
Another interesting factoid about rare elements: Very little nickel is found in the Earth’s crust. Most nickel has arrived on Earth from meteors. Usually mixed with iron, which held-back the arrival of the iron-age.
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Last time I bought what I thought was a pure balloon of He, I’m pretty sure it had gotten cut with fentanyl.
How high did it get? Asking for errr… science…
What the fuck are you on about? Helium is an element. Doesn’t matter if it’s low purity it’s wasted and then gone. When the high purity stuff is gone we can’t be like “thank god we can purify the low wall quality stuff” when that’s gone too
Look, there’s one right there!
It isn’t exactly wasted. Like you said, it’s an element. Short of any nuclear reactions, it won’t be destroyed (plus I’m not entirely clear if any useful reactions actually consume helium).
Helium in balloons is returning to the atmosphere. We can re harvest it if we want. While that sounds wasteful, it might actually be more efficient than trying to purify lower grade helium.
I’ll put it this way. If the helium in balloons could be easily purified to what they need for industrial uses, we wouldn’t be using helium in balloons. Purification industry would drive the price of it sky high.
EDIT: Ignore most of this, I didn’t do my due research.
No. It wafts away into space. All the helium we find is a product of radioactive decay- alpha particles- which gets trapped underground. Once it’s released into the atmosphere, it is effectively gone.
I won’t speak to the purification aspect (though I suspect purification is quite trivial), but helium released into the atmosphere is wasted. Saying it’s not destroyed is by the by, we aren’t going to recover it from space as it rapidly escapes the atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed; therefore it’s fine if I leave all my lights on 24/7 and use inefficient power hungry bulbs. It’s not a waste if it isn’t destroyed!
-This guy, apparently
Using it for balloons is still a waste because that impure helium could be purified for better uses.
No, no it could not.
The stuff used in balloons isn’t pure enough to be used for cryogenic purposes, which is what people really want it for.
And before you ask purifying it is really difficult.
Incorrect. It is not found naturally pure, it must be distilled. Balloon helium vs cryogenic helium is like comparing ice distillation vs vapor distillation of liquor. One is cheaper but both are using up a limited resource.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation
yeah it’s distilled off from nitrogen-heavy natural gas, like you could do with nitrogen-heavy gas without helium, or even air. all three processes are done commercially. the issue is that helium bearing natural gas is limited in supply and getting low enough temperature at latter stages of helium refining and liquefying requires bespoke facility. this part is hard
“Lookie lookie, I got a wiki!”
-you, probably.
You guys realize this is the same shit anti vaxxers do? Spend five minutes reading a fucking Wikipedia article and suddenly you’re an expert?
Christ I hate you people.
I have a degree in this stuff. Chill.
The lemmy community shows itself bare when you start talking about something you have professional experience in. Its hilarious, in a humor in despair type of way. I’ve seen it on stuff im expirenced in and this is not the first time I’ve talked about how the community dissapoints me about it. Skepticism is fine and welcome . . . If you’re able to change your mind when you’re wrong.
You need 0° to chill properly though.
Everyone in this thread has a degree, apparently.
I sure do, in fact I’ve emptied more helium tanks in my career than 99.99% of the population I’m certain (10 years in gas chromatography). I know that it’s more profitable to sell 99% pure helium as “party use” than it is to sell the quality of helium I use, the difference is I use enough of it that there’s still some profit there, (the same reason the US of A sold off the “extra reserves”) and as long as it’s an unlimited resource (short term it certainly seems to be from the capitalist mindset) they’re going to milk every cent of profit out of it as quickly as possible, so they’ll still make some and sell it to me.
No helium found on earth ever, was pure enough for cryo. Not even close. All helium is found in low concentrations and spun extracted to concentrate and start to purify it. Then there are additional filter methods to finish concentrating it. Removing the hydrogen is about the hardest because it’s also abundant and small and light.
But helium used in balloons can absolutely be concentrated and purified.
hydrogen is the easy one, because you can burn it off on catalytic bed, then pass through bed of 3A MS to trap water. done
separating excess oxygen and nitrogen is easier and there’s already some nitrogen (as much as 50%) in crude helium
yes you can, crude helium + air mixture (few %) is used in first stages of cryogenic helium purifying
Jesus Christ not this guy again…
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
I don’t know much about Helium, so I’m a bit confused… What’s to stop us from purifying grade 4 further into 4.7 and beyond besides cost? If the only thing stopping us is cost, then it’s not inaccurate to say that, regardless of grade, the non-renewable element of Helium is being used in frivolous ways because it makes more money to find profitable ways to use the lower-grade helium than to actually further purify and conserve it for more important usage.
So the cost aspect is absolutely massive. You can theoretically filter elemental gold out of sea water, but it’s not reasonable to do that to supply gold for use in electronics. Similarly you can purify helium as much as you want but at a certain point the cost makes whatever you were doing with it prohibitively expensive.
Right now we’re still pulling helium out of the ground alongside natural gas deposits. We’re also not doing everything we can to recover, recycle, or substitute the industrial and scientific grade stuff either.
As less helium gets extracted the cost will go up. This will put market pressure on all users to use it more efficiently or find substitutes wherever possible. If the price goes high enough it might also drive producers to purify helium that might have been sold at a lower grade in the past.
This find in Minnesota pushes that future scenario down the road a bit, which can either extend the status quo or buy time for technological improvements to be made that will make use and extraction more efficient.
So we should wait until scarcity is a problem before we even think about acting?
That’s done humanity very well before. Fortunately for the helium industry our previous inaction will likely leave the planet uninhabitable for most life before the helium scarcity demands action.
No, we shouldn’t wait.
We will, but we shouldn’t.
Tommy’s dad didn’t steal tank of 6N helium, but it did rolled off the same facility using the same process, main impurity being air (considering it’s a rather minor use, maybe balloon gas is just what is left after cleaning or purging empty helium tanks of higher grade. so it’s maybe not a massive loss. recycling helium within cryogenics and MRI would provide more benefit)
also wtf is “grade”, 6N means “six nines” means 99.9999%. (americans will use anything but metric units) liquid helium freezes everything else out so it’s 5N without any special extra purification, or at least that’s my impression from looking up spec sheets of helium from facility that i know uses cryogenic purification for it
Lol…
Do you link British Petroleum’s website when people talk about how bad climate change is?
… No, but I’d sure trust them to describe oil drilling to me.
Christ, Lemmy sucks ass
Kid or troll. Hopefully kid. Has to be. There are so many imbeciles on this site it’s hard to tell sometimes though
Amen. Some of the shit I see here…
So leave?
My label for that user is, “regularly confidently incorrect”.
There are a few power users like them around here and it can be fun to watch them argue with folks. Perhaps they just enjoy the act of arguing? They might just be malicious, but I prefer to imagine that most people are trying their best to engage in good faith more often than not.
Like I said, it’s made of the same dipshits as Reddit.
You are free to fuck right off
Buddy, the second I find a better content aggregator that isn’t Reddit I’m out.
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.
Can’t we sensationalise the same way they would…
Capitalists care about their own capital, not their children.
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right or wrong, you’re an asshole. Nobody did anything but disagree with you, you’re the only one insulting strangers. Quit being an ass.
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.
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”.
Thanks for the link. Interesting read.
No problem, glad you enjoyed it!
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.
What does any of that have to do with you correcting me without doing even a modicum of research or having any familiarity with the topic?
The fuck is wrong with people here…
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.
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.
technology is there, the issue is to run it cheaply, reliably and on scale. this is the actual problem
edit: i mean it’s a problem that responds well to throwing money at it. if there was extra need for helium that would be met by diverting balloon gas, then it would work at some price, but we’re nowhere close to 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
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…
I don’t recommend fucking balloons. The squeaks are annoying and the pops hurt.
You need more lube.
I think for balloons we should switch back to hydrogen. What could possibly go wrong?
It would make birthday parties more fun
Probably not much. The hydrogen that a party balloon would contain could certainly make a small, exciting explosion, but it probably wouldn’t have enough energy to set anything else on fire.
It’s a common high school chem lab demonstration. Without added oxygen, the H2 balloons sort of burn from the outside in, and you get a sort of slow burning mushroom plume. It could light paper or cloth on fire in close proximity.
With added oxygen… BLAM! It could shatter windows.
You willing to risk your house, life, and the lives of your children in that?
Yes. I use flammable gas for cooking and heating in my home everyday, hydrogen science kit toys are available for children to play with, and I have some experience working with actually dangerous high pressure hydrogen and oxygen to boot.
helium just boils off in MRI/NMR machines, this is the major use of helium i think. if you could recycle that in machines that already are out there, that would solve lots of problems. there are newer systems that do not require cryogens or just require liquid nitrogen which is much cheaper and less energy intensive. these things use closed loop refrigeration, but in turn you need to supply them with power
Sounds like superconductor research could end up fixing that problem. Once we have a suitable conductor material, you no longer need to keep it that cool.
not exactly, because if someone finds out that high temperature superconductor works even better at 4K, then it will be running at 4K, making entire thing more compact or allowing for higher fields
And giant blimps.
The helium used for balloons is not the same type of helium used in medical and scientific equipment.
Wdym? The only difference is the helium gas used in more serious applications is more pure. Its helium all the same.
Look up Helium-3 vs Helium-4, it most certainly is not “all the same”.
Helium-3 is not used in general applications, its uses are far more niche, it is much more rare than helium 4. For most applications, when we talk about helium being used we mean plain old helium-4. MRI machines and balloons both use helium-4.