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Helium is a byproduct of natural gas production. Only a few wells are even setup to capture it because of the associated economic cost. If we really care abou
by alex_young 3y ago
Helium is a byproduct of natural gas production. Only a few wells are even setup to capture it because of the associated economic cost.
If we really care about conserving helium we would probably not vent it directly into the atmosphere while extracting natural gas.
Party balloons are not the problem here.
- Ographer 3y agoThe issue is mostly with our refining capabilities. Helium is mixed with natural gas as it travels from wells to compressor stations which push it down the pipeline to the refinery for separation. There are only 14 refineries in the world set up to capture helium, half of which are in the United States. Building new refineries can take decades and is extremely expensive. The refinery and wells also must be located near radioactive reserves which decay and produce the helium. You're absolutely right about party balloons not being an existential threat. There are two types of Helium for commercial sale: balloon-grade and Ultra High Purity Grade. Balloon grade Helium is used strictly for balloons and is not adequate to be used as a shielding gas or in any medical capacity. Ultra High Purity Grade has undergone the scrubbing process after extraction, and is safe for welding, industrial and medical applications.
- foota 3y agoIsn't the resource being consumed the same though? I imagine ultra high grade is just more refined? Or is the balloon grade gas not economically refinable to the pure gas?
- simcop2387 3y agoNot just non-economical, but like almost all purification processes you will be producing balloon grade from the production of the ultra pure gas. Intrinsicly there will be helium that you can't separate from the other gasses that you removed from the helium.
- foota 3y agoSome non-zero remainder is all but inevitable, but even if your refining process yields 1 part pure to 99 parts mixed, after N steps you have 1 - (0.99) ^ N percent pure gas out of the whole, right? So the ratio is somewhat arbitrarily (up to whatever the limit of your refining process is).
- bananaflag 3y agoThis assumes that the refining process works the same no matter what the initial concentration is. (Don't know if it's true or not, but it's an unstated assumption.)
- wonnage 3y agoBalloon gas is already 99% helium. There’s not that much of it (one source is apparently as a byproduct of filling pure helium containers) and reprocessing it is not economical.
- simcop2387 3y agoUnfortunately that doesn't usually hold out because as things get closer but not quite to the purity you need, you tend to need longer times, larger surfaces areas, higher temps, etc. in order to continue the process. You tend to hit spots during purification where you end up with an Azetrope (or similar for gasses) where you can't do a lot of the same techniques anymore because the impurities and the gas you want end up behaving the same at that concentration. At that point you have to start looking at adding catalysts or other chemical reactions to destroy or transform the impurities so that you can remove the end products from those reactions. But as you have less and less of the impurities it then ends up harder to target them to purify further. It's a nasty cycle that can drive costs up exponentially in terms of reagents, dollars, time and energy needed to do the purification. Ethyl Alcohol is a fun little rabbit hole to look at, at ~95% purity it forms an azetrope with water and you can no longer distill off the water or alcohol separately and have to resort to chemical or other means to get further purity. That's why you usually end up with other alcohols as a byproduct when purifying further (methanol in particular, since it disrupts the azetrope and lets you boil things off) or have to take rather expensive methods that remove the water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope
- altacc 3y agoThe idea of "balloon-grade" led me down a rabbit hole. It seems that there are many defined grades of He with the majority being grade 5 (99.999% purity, 2 steps down from the purest) and the majority of He used, including in balloons is grade 5 due to ease of transporting just one grade. That made it cheaper to use grade 5 for party balloons than artificially reducing the quality. In the last few years there has been more low quality balloon grade (97.5% purity) produced by refineries in the US, increasing the availability and reducing the cost. http://www.kornbluthheliumconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cryo1.pdf http://www.kornbluthheliumconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/... https://zephyrsolutions.com/what-are-the-different-grades-of-helium-and-what-are-they-used-for/ https://zephyrsolutions.com/what-are-the-different-grades-of...
- PaulHoule 3y agoCouldn't you just buy high purity helium and mix in some air close to the point of sale?
- mtoner23 3y agoyou're not going to save much cost by doing that 99 -> 97% isnt much difference in helium. the difficulty is not in the quantity of helium but the purity. if you dont care much about the purity it will be cheaper to produce.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wmil 3y agoWorse, oil wells frequently flame off natural gas because it's not economical to capture it from those wells. So there are layers of waste.
- jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago[flagged]
- sebmellen 3y agoIt's still better to flare it than to vent it without flaring [0]. In Texas there's a huge problem of wells venting without flaring that's been documented by some groups with IR cameras [1]. [0]: https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/natural-gas-flaring-and-venting-regulations-report https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/natural-gas-flaring-and... [1]: https://youtu.be/y4eDlG9U25c https://youtu.be/y4eDlG9U25c
- chimeracoder 3y ago> It's still better to flare it than to vent it without flaring [0]. Yes, though that's just because methane is itself 2 orders of magnitude worse for the environment than carbon dioxide, not because combustion itself is actually good.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kragen 3y agoif combustion removes 99% of the methane's global warming potential, what would count as 'actually good' in your eyes? (or if you mean combustion in the abstract, not in this particular situation, keep in mind that aerobic respiration is combustion; without combustion the only life forms that would continue to exist would be anaerobic bacteria)
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
- Animats 3y agoOn the party balloon front, it's time to stop selling those on the San Francisco peninsula. SF Muni is only 600V. Caltrain is 25KV traction power. Power is now on in some sections. The western US has never had 25KV overhead traction power until this month. 25KV is far more dangerous, and the catenary wire isn't that high up, closer than the length of some balloon strings. Rather long and grim Network Rail (UK) public service announcement.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udaS3NDCkk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udaS3NDCkk0
- seszett 3y agoI don't know if it's common in the UK, I would guess not, but we have had thousands of kilometers of 25kV lines in France for half a century now, and I have never heard of people being electrocuted because their balloons had touched the catenaries.
- emmet 3y agoYou mean to tell me that people don't often go around with balloons on 10 meter long strings?
- splitstud 3y ago[dead]
- yetanotherloser 3y agoQuite a lot of 25kV AC overhead in the UK. I'm sure it is possible to create a dangerous situation with those and a helium balloon, but it seems to be very rare. I don't think this is a real problem.
- CamperBob2 3y agoThat seems beyond silly. Any pointers to sources where problems with balloons contacting high-tension lines have actually occurred? I don't see why party balloons haven't moved to hydrogen, myself. They'd add a bit of spark to the occasion.
- bilsbie 3y agoIt’s weird they always find a way to blame the average person.
- randomdata 3y agoThe large group of average people hold control under democracy, so if a small group of remarkable people want to see change, they have to appeal to the average person.
- askin4it 3y agoAppeal = ?
- randomdata 3y agoThe math adds up.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoAgreed. My old naive self used to think there was some benefit to making the "average person" aware of the issue at large so they would care about it and potentially agitate for a fix (if enough people cared about it), but then I realized it was a total headfake to distract from the real issue. Water conservation is my favorite example. Yeah, let's all worry about not washing our cars when meanwhile agriculture and industry uses orders of magnitude more water and often has 0 incentives to reduce use.
- jagaerglad 3y agoAn aside but another good reason to not wash your car is leeching harmful stuff in the environment, car washes have to purify the waste water where I'm from at least
- foobarian 3y agoWe don't wash our cars much here but being told to shower less while big Ag is growing almonds in the desert is a slap in the face.
- pfdietz 3y agoWouldn't liquefaction to produce LNG automatically separate out the helium, or at least concentrate it in a residuum of minor gases?
- marcosdumay 3y agoI'd guess the helium comes out mixed with the liquid, and just vents out faster at the beginning of the storage time.
- pfdietz 3y agoHelium is not very soluble in liquid methane. Some will dissolve, but unless the He concentration was very low I don't think it's going to all or even mostly dissolve. Also, LNG typically undergoes a step where dissolved nitrogen (which is typically several percent of natural gas) is flashed to vapor. Helium is less soluble than nitrogen in LNG, so the helium will be flashed off also. There's then the problem of separating the helium and nitrogen, but presumably that's an easier problem.
- hnbad 3y agoI recall a panic about us running out of helium a few years ago followed by abrupt silence as the increased cost of helium led to more helium being salvaged from natural gas extraction. It's one of those rare cases where you can literally point at a moment in time and see a textbook example of "the market" in action. I also recall that then too there were articles about how us foolish consumers were wasting this non-renewable good on party balloons while the actual amount of helium used to fill party balloons is less than a rounding error compared to how much helium industry needs and uses (which in turn is nothing compared to how much uncaptured helium is lost during natural gas extraction).