Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Ultra clean rooms with massive air handling systems can't recapture all their helium?

Or is this just a temporary thing based on where processing is located?

Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. I guess you could do technically do that with the fab's air but it is a LOT of volume of air to liquefy and likely costs more than even inflated helium prices.

Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration, and I imagine even the best case scenario for capturing it from a fab has abysmal concentration of helium. But because most of it is vented it also means if the capital is put down to build more helium separators on gas wells it wouldn't take long to increase supply. Short term for a year or two it can be a problem, but beyond that it is simply a cost versus demand issue. There is neither a technological nor source limitation, it is a pure capital investment limitation.

The fact that all helium escapes the atmosphere, and is essentially impossible to produce makes things a bit more complicated.

    > Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it.

This is wild. I never thought about how they separated gases from natural gas fields. The carbon footprint of each kg of that helium must be astonishingly large.

I hope systems which separate helium: 1. have very good thermal insulation 2. use heat exchangers so separated gases can cool down incoming gas.

Well yes but that's only if you consider the helium to be the only reason for the natural gas extraction which is obviously isn't.

It's more of a byproduct in that sense.

> Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration

I remember a similar situation with neon early in the Ukraine invasion a few years ago. What I expect to happen is some other source coming online that currently doesn't try to capture it for economic reasons.

Helium recovery in scientific settings for cost saving reasons is already done, so it's not like there isn't expertise in using it.

Helium is actually pretty hard to keep ahold of, being a very light and small noble gas. It can diffuse through a surprising amount of materials, flow through far smaller cracks than you would expect, and is quite hard to filter out of a mixture of gases.

Also superfluid helium (a big chunk of helium used for refrigeration like in e.g. the LHC) has the weird property of flowing the same speed through a tiny hole as a large one and coating everything with a molecular coating. Superfluid helium is basically a bose einstein condensate but macro-scale, totally counterintuitive. Essentially a thermal superconductor. Zero viscosity.

Unless you need it to be less than 3 kelvin for some reason, helium doesn't do that.

AFAIK they recapture most, but recapturing all simply isn't possible / financially feasible. And they use a lot of helium, so even if they capture most of it, the losses are still higher than the currently available supply.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com