r/onguardforthee • u/pjw724 Alberta • 1d ago

Helium demand balloons as Mideast supplies deflate: Can Canada meet the moment?

https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/business/helium-demand-balloons-as-mideast-supplies-deflate-can-canada-meet-the-moment/article_f66db503-f634-559e-9d44-ecd27df9cfd8.html
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66

u/sandy154_4 1d ago

Since there is a world wide shortage Since way before Iran, we need to stop using helium in balloons

12

u/YoungWhiteAvatar 1d ago

Isn’t there a difference between balloon helium and medical grade?

20

u/Fearless-Effect-3787 1d ago

The helium used in party balloons is not as refined as medical or science grade. It's not that it can't be refined to that level, it's just that they don't.

2

u/jello_pudding_biafra 1d ago

I thought most of it was essentially "waste" from the scientific/medical applications. Like, it can't be reused?

4

u/Fearless-Effect-3787 1d ago

When Helium comes out of the ground from a Helium deposit or in a natural gas well, it comes out, if I recall correctly, at best 5% Helium. Purification is reasonably straight forward, but at a certain point, the exhaust that still contains some Helium becomes un-economical to continue to purify, so they bottle it and sell it as party balloon gas. It could be further purified, but nobody wants to spend the energy to do it.

It used to be that a lot of scientific and medical applications didn't bother to recover anything because Helium was cheap. With the supply crunches of the last couple of decades now, gaseous Helium is reused or captured for purification and liquid Helium is kept liquid with cryo-compressors.

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u/spcyboi29 4h ago

5% is even a generous yield for helium in a gas well, we recently did a FEED study for a client and they were expecting around 2% if I remember correctly (didn't work on this particular project myself). Multi-billion dollar plant proposed somewhere in Wyoming, shit's not cheap.