Congress Reaches Agreement ... On Helium

Despite the wrangling that's resulted in a government shut-down, Congress managed last week to agree on one thing: Helium. Reader gbrumfiel writes: "The U.S. holds vast helium reserves which it sells to scientists and private industry. According to NPR, a new law was needed to allow the helium to continue to flow. Congress passed it late last week, but only after a year-long lobbying effort and intense debate (and in the end, Senator Ted Cruz opposed the measure). Can a new bipartisanship rise out of this cooperation? Or will hot air prevail on Capitol Hill? (Insert your helium joke here.)" Apparently, helium is not yet so scarce that it's not available in balloons at the grocery store.

YAY! I'm going diving next month.

[olddoc]

I plan to do some deep Scuba dives next month and I will be breathing high quality, pure Helium mixed in with my Oxygen and Nitrogen to prevent Nitrogen narcosis at depth. I'm glad the supply will continue in the future and I hope there is a plan to replace what the US Government has stockpiled.

Re:Thank god we have Ted Cruz

[rujholla]

Note from TFA that the disagreement that Senator Cruz had with the bill was that he and the House supported the version of the bill that said that the money from Helium sales should go to defecit reduction and the bill that passed that he voted against had the money going for national parks and "environmental issues."

Re:Balloons

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporatist propaganda, more likely. Helium is extracted from natural gas - and that's a damn sight lower grade than 'balloon air'. No, this is just another example of whistling past the 'graveyard' of global resource exhaustion.

Re:Thank god we have Ted Cruz

[Anonymous Coward]

So now deficit reduction is a pork project but national parks aren't? Wow. Just wow. No wonder we can't find a common ground between the goose steppers of the two major parties when that's the kind of rhetoric being thrown around.
 
And don't get me wrong, I'm for national parks. If the government is going to step outside of the constitution and spend my dime I think parks are a good place to do it. Better than feeding the unwilling-to-work masses with HoHos, cheap vodka and smokes. But the bottom line is that the nation has a crisis on its hands that so far has been covered up by a couple generations of administrations using creative accounting and flowery language. When is America going to wake up to what it has become and who is paying for it?

Re:Balloons

[nmr_andrew]

And helium cannot be enriched or purified? Is it really better to let a (practically) non-renewable resource escape into space than save it for when it becomes economical to refine?

Emphasis mine

That's exactly what's been happening. Most of the natural gas extractors decided that as long as the government was selling helium at a very low price, it wasn't economical to collect it. AFAIK, Exxon-Mobil has one major site in Wyoming and that's about it (and it's currently down for "maintenance"). Of course, this is complete crap - they just don't want to be bothered.

Currently the BLM charges $84 per million cubic feet of crude helium [blm.gov] (scroll halfway down the page or so). It takes ~27 cu.ft. of gas to make 1 liter of liquid. We get pretty good pricing and pay roughly $10/L of liquid helium. If we assume it costs $1 to purify and liquefy gas to make one liter, heck, if it costs $5 and the gas is only 50% pure, the "big 3" suppliers aren't losing any money and could easily pay more if the natural gas producers collected and sold the helium.

Re:Thank god we have Ted Cruz

[nmr_andrew]

Oddly enough, that's essentially what at least 2 of the big 3 industrial gas suppliers suggested during the month or so leading up to the new bill - that they would pay 100% of the costs to run and maintain the facility. But the government (or at least BLM) told them they couldn't do that.

The most non-renewable of all resources

[Squidlips]

Once it is gone, it is irrevocably gone. We should be a LOT more careful with this resource.