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The article says it results also in the production of natural gas. A more efficient (due to ubiquity) solution seems to be ensuring its capture at gas productio

The article says it results also in the production of natural gas. A more efficient (due to ubiquity) solution seems to be ensuring its capture at gas production sites.

fluidcruft 13y ago
MR folklore that I've never bothered to corroborate says: We like helium because it doesn't react with anything. That also means we can't easily extract it from anything--you have to extract everything else until only helium remains. This is a ridiculously expensive process. The large underground domes that trapped natural gas in Texas also trapped the helium that resulted from millennia of radioactive decay within the Earth. Getting helium from that sort of a deposit is comparatively inexpensive. In the early 20st century, we believed helium airships were going to become important military weapons, and we started to stock pile helium as a strategic reserve--Texas natural gas producers were mandated to extract the helium and give it to the government for storage and eventual military use rather than vent it into the atmosphere. Later we got airplanes, and airships became a thing of the past like dodos. And since we had a large store of helium, it was available for research and science and balloons. Cool things developed. For MR this meant high-fields generated by superconducting magnets. But of course maintaining a large stockpile of helium is also expensive. And what does the public know about helium? Why are we wasting our money on balloons and funny voices and besides if scientists say it's important, then it must be the devil's plaything. So along came the Gingrich-era House and the Contract with America. Congress stopped the economically-crushing over-bearing regulatory burden of helium trapping that was crushing Texas's natural gas competitiveness. Congress also decided to simultaneously make a few bucks by selling of the helium reserve at cut rate prices, killing any chance of economic incentives developing a secondary market for helium. You can't simultaneously cut funding for science and jack up the prices of helium, that would be one straw too far! Thus the large US reserve was to be sold off at very low prices. Texas natural gas producers thereby had little incentive to catch the helium themselves as they plowed through the easy natural gas supply, so it was vented. And the Texas dome natural gas was extremely easy to mine, so production skyrocketed after being freed from the shackles of government regulations. Now that we've moved through the domed natural gas, we're going after the harder to reach natural gas via fracking.
- ijk 13y ago
  > In the early 21st century Pedantic, but I assume you meant "early 20th century."
  - fluidcruft 13y ago
    Thanks, fixed.
- BWStearns 13y ago
  <sarc> Thank god for that $1 billion in savings though. Without that we'd be in really tough shape economically. </sarc> In all honest did not know about the history behind all that. Thanks for sharing.

The article says it results also in the production of natural gas. A more efficient (due to ubiquity) solution seems to be ensuring its capture at gas production sites.

fluidcruft 13y ago

MR folklore that I've never bothered to corroborate says: We like helium because it doesn't react with anything. That also means we can't easily extract it from anything--you have to extract everything else until only helium remains. This is a ridiculously expensive process. The large underground domes that trapped natural gas in Texas also trapped the helium that resulted from millennia of radioactive decay within the Earth. Getting helium from that sort of a deposit is comparatively inexpensive. In the early 20st century, we believed helium airships were going to become important military weapons, and we started to stock pile helium as a strategic reserve--Texas natural gas producers were mandated to extract the helium and give it to the government for storage and eventual military use rather than vent it into the atmosphere. Later we got airplanes, and airships became a thing of the past like dodos. And since we had a large store of helium, it was available for research and science and balloons. Cool things developed. For MR this meant high-fields generated by superconducting magnets. But of course maintaining a large stockpile of helium is also expensive. And what does the public know about helium? Why are we wasting our money on balloons and funny voices and besides if scientists say it's important, then it must be the devil's plaything. So along came the Gingrich-era House and the Contract with America. Congress stopped the economically-crushing over-bearing regulatory burden of helium trapping that was crushing Texas's natural gas competitiveness. Congress also decided to simultaneously make a few bucks by selling of the helium reserve at cut rate prices, killing any chance of economic incentives developing a secondary market for helium. You can't simultaneously cut funding for science and jack up the prices of helium, that would be one straw too far! Thus the large US reserve was to be sold off at very low prices. Texas natural gas producers thereby had little incentive to catch the helium themselves as they plowed through the easy natural gas supply, so it was vented. And the Texas dome natural gas was extremely easy to mine, so production skyrocketed after being freed from the shackles of government regulations. Now that we've moved through the domed natural gas, we're going after the harder to reach natural gas via fracking.

ijk 13y ago
> In the early 21st century Pedantic, but I assume you meant "early 20th century."
- fluidcruft 13y ago
  Thanks, fixed.
BWStearns 13y ago
<sarc> Thank god for that $1 billion in savings though. Without that we'd be in really tough shape economically. </sarc> In all honest did not know about the history behind all that. Thanks for sharing.