“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.
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.
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
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?
… 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
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.
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.
