“Oh please! Helium is a constituent of the air we breathe. In the commercial gas business air is “liquefied” by compressing and cooling. That’s how we get liquid Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon, Helium and Hydrogen. These are commodities. The idea that the government has to be involved in any way is just ridiculous!”
Didn’t take very many STEM courses, hmm?
Helium, being incredibly rare on Earth anyway (a byproduct of radioactive decay), tends to float up and out of the atmosphere. The amount you could obtain from ordinary air is vanishingly small, and would take vast processing and energy to fractionalize. Most of the helium comes from certain few oil and gas wells that happened to collect radioactive by-products from deep in the Earth (the center of the Earth contains metals, i.e., uranium, and this is where much of the natural heat of the Earth comes from).
“Helium, being incredibly rare on Earth anyway (a byproduct of radioactive decay), tends to float up and out of the atmosphere. The amount you could obtain from ordinary air is vanishingly small, and would take vast processing and energy to fractionalize. Most of the helium comes from certain few oil and gas wells that happened to collect radioactive by-products from deep in the Earth (the center of the Earth contains metals, i.e., uranium, and this is where much of the natural heat of the Earth comes from).”
I don’t remember if the number of wells involved is 8 or 14. Helium is rare and valuable.