I live near a business that has tank farms and piping for pressurized gases. They provide a lot of oxygen for health care use. If they can “manufacture” a gas, why can’t they make more helium?
In: 5
Wow, thank you all for the comprehensive answers! I had been wondering about this for a while now.
Helium is generally gotten when it’s found trapped in natural gas wells (the same rock formations that trap gas may trap helium that’s rising from natural decay of the Earth’s Uranium). During World War I, when blimps were new thought to possibly become a strategic material (the nation with helium would have more blimps than other nations). So the US government created a strategic reserve of Helium shortly after the war.
Long after helium stopped being a strategic gas, the US still had this reserve. Until congress said why are we paying money to keep helium for war blimps almost a century after anyone has used a war blimp?
Then congress passed a law that said sell of the helium in the reserve, and the way to sell off many years of helium production is to sell it cheap. That meant two important things. First if you found e helium in your gas well, you were going to be competing with someone who has no cost and hates helium trying to sell it and two it was cheap enough for a lot of low value uses.
The shortage arose because several decades after congress said sell off that stupid helium, they finally have. So now people have to pay the real price for helium, they can’t buy cheap government helium because they don’t want to own it any more. Further it’s going to take time for the gas wells rich in helium to invest in equipment to capture the now valuable helium to sell (before it was money wasted because the government would just further reduce the price).
You can’t really *make* helium (or oxygen, for that matter) out of other elements without using nuclear fusion or fission. You *can* extract oxygen out of air (air is about 1/5th oxygen), or out of water (because water is made of oxygen and hydrogen).
Helium, on the other hand, is a lot harder to come across in large quantities on Earth.
Latest Answers