“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.
Incorrect. It is not found naturally pure, it must be distilled. Balloon helium vs cryogenic helium is like comparing ice distillation vs vapor distillation of liquor. One is cheaper but both are using up a limited resource.
“Lookie lookie, I got a wiki!”
-you, probably.
You guys realize this is the same shit anti vaxxers do? Spend five minutes reading a fucking Wikipedia article and suddenly you’re an expert?
Christ I hate you people.
I have a degree in this stuff. Chill.
The lemmy community shows itself bare when you start talking about something you have professional experience in. Its hilarious, in a humor in despair type of way. I’ve seen it on stuff im expirenced in and this is not the first time I’ve talked about how the community dissapoints me about it. Skepticism is fine and welcome . . . If you’re able to change your mind when you’re wrong.
Everyone in this thread has a degree, apparently.
I sure do, in fact I’ve emptied more helium tanks in my career than 99.99% of the population I’m certain (10 years in gas chromatography). I know that it’s more profitable to sell 99% pure helium as “party use” than it is to sell the quality of helium I use, the difference is I use enough of it that there’s still some profit there, (the same reason the US of A sold off the “extra reserves”) and as long as it’s an unlimited resource (short term it certainly seems to be from the capitalist mindset) they’re going to milk every cent of profit out of it as quickly as possible, so they’ll still make some and sell it to me.
You need 0° to chill properly though.
yeah it’s distilled off from nitrogen-heavy natural gas, like you could do with nitrogen-heavy gas without helium, or even air. all three processes are done commercially. the issue is that helium bearing natural gas is limited in supply and getting low enough temperature at latter stages of helium refining and liquefying requires bespoke facility. this part is hard
