![]() To learn more about this new recovery system, visit bit.ly/HeliumRecovery. Although they have spent close to a million dollars to get this system operational, because of rising helium costs the team predicts that within four to five years the system will save enough money to recover the initial investment. Tapas Mal, Penn State NMR Facility director, had worked with various Penn State members since 2019 to acquire funding to purchase equipment and build the system to support their nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging facilities. Just two months into 2022, helium markets were already experiencing "Helium Shortage 4.0," and the Department of Chemistry had set up their own helium recovery system in the Chemistry Building. Since 2009, the Department of Physics has greatly increased capacity in Osmond Lab and added two more helium recapture systems in Davey Lab. Just two years after their visit, the first unit was purchased and assembled in Osmond Lab. Chan and Facilities Manager Robert “Bob” Holden visited Cornell University to better understand what building and maintaining such a system would entail. In 2006, the helium market experienced its first shortage, dubbed "Helium Shortage 1.0." In an effort to ensure the product supply would be secure, Moses Chan, professor emeritus of physics and Evan Pugh University Professor, set out to create Eberly’s first helium recapture system. In an effort to secure supplies, cut back on costs, and improve the sustainability of its research enterprise, the Eberly College of Science has invested in helium recapture systems that effectively allow scientists to reuse helium that would have previously been lost. For these reasons, the world has faced a helium shortage for nearly two decades. However, helium is a non-renewable resource-it cannot be made in the lab-and its gaseous form can escape the atmosphere and be lost to space. In fact, the element can stay in liquid form at absolute zero, -459.67˚F, making it ideal for certain research processes, such as maintaining samples and instruments at low temperatures. While it did help pay off the cost of the reserve, the quick sell-off at below market prices discouraged private competition as well as conservation of this non-renewable resource.Helium gas, aside from keeping party balloons aloft, has a variety of important uses, in part for the ability of its liquid form to maintain very cold temperatures. Congress directed the government out of the helium business with the Helium Privatization Act of 1996. The reserve continued to build, but by the mid-90s, blimps weren’t a bit part of the military. The porous underground rock spanning portions of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas holds gas like a sponge holds liquid, capped above by calcium anhydrite and on the sides by water. This one-of-kind system stores about more than a third of the world's helium in crude form in the Cliffside gas field. In the 1960s, the Federal Helium Reserve was created. In the 1950s, helium became important to the space program. In the 1920s, when blimps were a weapon of war, 90% of the helium extracted in the U.S. Much of the extraction in the United States and the world comes from underground gas fields between Amarillo, Texas, and Hugoton, Kansas, where a very high concentration, up to 2%, can be found. But whether this has led to the shortage remains unclear. ![]() ![]() Nearly all of our helium is extracted from natural gas, a byproduct of radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. Helium demand has been rising consistently since 2009, and the market has increased at CAGR 10.1 per cent since 2010. But helium has far more critical uses than birthday balloons. That makes it a very good lifting gas in applications like balloons and blimps. At the time, helium demands dropped as much as 15 percent. The helium atom is smaller than any other element, and only hydrogen is lighter. Helium shortage 3.0, beginning in 2019, began its recovery when the pandemic slowed helium demand, allowing the market to catch back up. ![]()
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