Hey, the Big Guy got his 10% of the sale, so what's the problem?
Posted on 01/26/2024 6:15:56 AM PST by logi_cal869
On Thursday, the U.S. government sold the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground stockpile based in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium.
Once the deal is finalized, the buyer — which will likely be the highest bidder, the industrial gas company Messer — will claim some 425 miles of pipelines spanning Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, plus about 1 billion cubic feet of the only element on Earth cold enough to make an MRI machine work.
Regulatory and logistical issues with the facility threaten a temporary shutdown as it passes from public to private ownership, and hospital supply chain experts worry the sale could have serious consequences for health care down the road — especially when it comes to MRIs.
To be sure, a Federal Helium Reserve shutdown wouldn’t mean that MRIs would suddenly power down across the country, said Soumi Saha, senior vice president of government affairs at Premier Inc., which contracts with helium suppliers on behalf of 4,400 hospitals in the U.S. “But we are stressing about this shortage. From a health care perspective, MRI machines are the No. 1 concern.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
from the ‘analysis’ link:
“After serving as the world’s largest provider of helium for nearly a century, the U.S. government is close to bowing out of the market. Aiming to recoup costs, it began emptying its vast underground reservoir of the gas in the 1990s and has now put the whole federal helium system up for sale. Early next year, the government plans to unveil bids from potential buyers of the Amarillo, Texas, facility, which includes a distribution pipeline and the porous rock formation containing the remaining stores of helium—a substance used in everything from MRI machines to quantum computers to party balloons.””
It’s unusual for the government to unilaterally choose to unload assets for ‘cost cutting’ without ‘budget cut’ concerns.
Despite the quote above, I share the same concern (”Why?”).
At least 10%.
Oh, the Germans knew that lesson well before the Hindenburg.
The lesson was that in the 1930s the United States had the only stockpile of Helium, and refused to sell it to the Germans because if Helium's strategic value, so Germany was forced to use Hydrogen for their Zeppelins.
Today Helium still has strategic value, but not for use in Zeppelins, for use as a supercooled liquid for making superconductors work. MRI machines use superconductors in their magnet coils, and require liquid Helium to function.
They invaded and drove out all the older, higher-paid programmers.
Me love some H1-B's!
Your post made me curious about the other uses for helium and I found this to be hilarious, given the timing.
Cryogenics, superconductivity, laser pointers, supersonic wind tunnels, cardiopulmonary resuscitation pumps, monitoring blimps used by the Border Patrol, and liquid fuel rockets all require helium in either their manufacture or use.
THE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY APPROVED OF THIS SALE: On Thursday, the Biden government sold the Federal Helium Reserve,in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium (w/ negative implications for Americans’ healthcare).
Once finalized, the buyer — the German industrial gas company Messer — will claim some 425 miles of pipelines spanning Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, plus about 1 billion cubic feet of the only element on Earth cold enough to make an MRI machine work.
The Biden family gets their cut, Hunter’s foreign influence peddling business scores, and there’s the usual 10% for the big guy.
Federal gov’t has no business controlling helium.
This is only 30% and much of the remainder is under control of US corporations, not foreign.
This article is lamenting the gov’t giving up power.
I liked it better when he was "Saint" Dogbert, casting out the demons of stupidity. We could use some of that right now.
Helium is also mixed with oxygen to supply breathing gas to saturation divers.
Biden is an aggressive nation killing cancer. The MSM protection fortress holds. These people have families and loved ones here too but shielding Biden is more important than the well being of their own families.
Energy independence, gone,
Economy, destroyed with debt,
Water storage, being decimated,
Farmland, sold to China or set fallow forever,
Freedom, crushed by Executive Order and dismissal of Supreme Court rulings,
FDA endangering life rather than protecting life.
Public Schools, corrupting our youth rather than educating them,
Justice system promotes crime and targets conservatives.
etc.....
Gottwald is hopeful the government will grant further delays to a sale that was originally scheduled for 2021. “We have a lot of folks who share our concerns,” he says.Once the helium is extracted, the reservoir could be used to store other gases, but for now, the sprawling government asset is beset by maintenance issues and litigation. Garvey wonders whether anyone will bid on the reserve at all. “We won’t know until they open those bids,” she says. “Believe me, we are all kind of curious.”
Could be quite a coup for China to be the bid winner.
Part of the reason industry have concerns about a shortage could be BECAUSE the government owns/controls it. In the past, its usually good when Fed.gov gets out of operating in private industry space.
Is this time different? I would have to study it more
What’s weird is that the marxists in DC are actually selling off public property at the moment. That’s not in their standard operating procedure
From at least the Clintons forward. Thirty plus years of national destruction from the Left.
Federal gov’t has no business controlling helium.
At the same time, as hard as it is to believe, most in the Federal government, including its political leaders, took it as a given, that America and Americans were exceptional and wanted only the best for us.
Today, such an attitude is considered extremist, xenophobic, ‘a threat to our democracy’, etc. etc. and condemned by all right-thinking people.
I’ve read post 1-35 and would just respectfully remind everyone that “the Government” owning something is BAD 99% of the time.
Let’s wait and see what the answer to WHY?..........IS.
Any German company specializing in industrial gases - should immediately put up a flag.
In 1898, a student, Adolf Messer founded a company for acetylene lamps in Frankfurt Höchst.
https://forward.com/news/481412/nazi-collaborator-monuments-in-germany/
Bad Soden — The spa town on the outskirts of Frankfurt has a conference center named for Nazi Party member and war profiteer Adolf Messer (1878–1954). Messer’s welding, cutting and industrial gas company employed slave labor and manufactured weapons for the Third Reich. In 2019, student protests forced Frankfurt’s Goethe University to rename a campus lounge that honored Messer.
(Wikipedia):
The company merged in 1965, with Knapsack Griesheim AG to form the new Messer Griesheim GmbH. After this merger Farbwerke Hoechst held two-thirds of the company shares.
Knapsack Griesheim AG - with ties to IG Farben, a manufacturer of Zyklon B.
Knapsack…..(1906 the Knapsack-Griesheim AG, later part of the Hoechst AG (see Hoechst below)
IG Farben - was a German company that manufactured Zyklon B - the gas used to exterminate Jews and other concentration camp prisoners.
The United States of America vs. Carl Krauch, et al., also known as the IG Farben Trial, was the sixth of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany (Nuremberg) after the end of World War II. IG Farben was the private German chemicals company allied with the Nazis that manufactured the Zyklon B gas used to commit genocide against millions of European Jews in the Holocaust.
IG Farben was founded in December 1925 as a merger of six companies: BASF (27.4 percent of equity capital); Bayer (27.4 percent); Hoechst including Cassella and Chemische Fabrik Kalle (27.4 percent)…
Liquidation of IG Farben:
Agfa, BASF and Bayer remained in business; Hoechst spun off its chemical business in 1999 as Celanese AG before merging with Rhône-Poulenc to form Aventis, which later merged with Sanofi-Synthélabo to form Sanofi. Two years earlier, another part of Hoechst was sold in 1997 to the chemical spin-off of Sandoz, the Muttenz (Switzerland) based Clariant. The successor companies remain some of the world's largest chemical and pharmaceutical companies.
Messer -> Knapsack-Griesheim AG -> Hoechst AG -> IG Farben -> Zyklon B
So it looks like the Messer Group has ties to Nazi Germany and to Zyklon B. The reason that this "deal" has not been publicized is to keep people from looking past the headlines.
When looking into the history of these German companies, it seems to be an intentional tangled muddled mass of information.
“iirc helium is used in spacex starship raptor engines”
Helium is an inert gas. It is used in the space industry (where I work) as a purging agent. Different cryogenic fuels are used in the space industry, so when a system needs purging, you use a gas that will not freeze nor provide flammable fuel to the system. The only thing helium would be used for on a rocket engine is to purge the system of dangerous gases (Liquid Hydrogen, Liquid Oxygen, Liquid Methane, etc...)
We use helium in testing and calibration.
Hey, the Big Guy got his 10% of the sale, so what's the problem?
it’s like a garage sale….. you’re spent all your savings, you’re refinanced the house spending all that money so now it sell everything else to further the “fundamental transformation of America”.
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