Just don’t call it “war” » « What’s with all the pedos nowadays?

Fascinating things I learned today

We get helium as a byproduct of liquified natural gas processing. So it’s a nice side effect of our dependence on oil.

I did not know that.

Helium is heavily used by the semiconductor industry. Making all those fancy high end chips requires helium in the process.

I had no idea.

30% of the world’s helium supply is extracted in Qatar, which ships it the semiconductor manufacturers in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.

There are all kinds of surprises in the global supply chain.

The ships that transport that crucial element are currently bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz.

I can see where this is going.

Iran just blew up one of Qatar’s helium plants.

Uh-oh.

All this destruction was triggered by a rogue American president, who is also a raging asshole and incompetent moron.

At least I already knew that!

I hope no one was hoping to get a new computer (or an MRI) in the future.

Oh, and hey, if you’ve got a birthday coming up, maybe ixnay on the artypay alloonsbay. They just seem wasteful.

Just don’t call it “war” » « What’s with all the pedos nowadays?

Comments

  1. raven says

    It gets a lot closer to home than a helium plant in Qatar.

    I drove by a gas station on my way home last night.
    Gas prices have gone up 50 cents per gallon in just a few days.
    I haven’t seen gas prices this high since I can’t even remember when.
    Google says it was last this high in 2022.

    Filling up one of those oversized pickup trucks the MAGAs favor with a 30 gallon tank now costs $165.

    Who voted for this and why?

  2. drsteve says

    Makes sense: the main source of new helium nuclei on earth is alpha decay in radioactive ores.

  3. Dunc says

    @ #1: What the Thousand-Year Blood Reign Means for Gas Prices

    Back to the OP, did you also know that (a) natural gas is a key feedstock for nitrogen-based fertilisers, via ammonia and urea, and (b) that somewhere between 20% and 30% of the world’s urea also needs to transit the Strait of Hormuz? Oh, and (c) there’s no strategic stockpile or reserve.

    You may find yourself more concerned about the price of bread than the price of gas.

  4. numerobis says

    Dunc: in the US, a lot of that fertilizer serves to fertilize corn for ethanol, so the price of gas will rise too!

    The saving grace regarding fertilizer is that crop yields aren’t linear in fertilizer input; the reduction in crop yields will be much less bad than the reduction in fertilizer. It’s still going to lead to high food prices, which is great for farmers and terrible for everyone else.

  5. numerobis says

    raven@1: the price is up only by $0.50/gal for you? That seems pretty low compared to the averages. The US average is up by nearly $1/gal (up nearly 50%).

  6. raven says

    It is up 50 cents in just a few days.
    Since the war started it is more like $1.00.

    They are raising prices every day now.

  7. stuffin says

    a rogue American president, who is also a raging asshole and incompetent moron.

    You went easy with your description of our President.

    Before the war gas prices by me were steady between $2.80 and $2.90. Yesterday and this morning as I drove around the prices were between $3.84 t0 $3.89. That is $1.00 increase.

  8. says

    This is one more powerful reason why we shouldn’t be burning fossil fuels to make electricity or heat our homes or drive our cars.
    Because we need those fossil fuels, or crude or whatever you want to refer to them as, for so many other things that are so much harder to replace.
    Expand wind and solar so we only need natural gas at night and free up all that natural gas that is burned during the day or on cloudy days.
    Helium, fertilizer, plastics, lubrication, etc.

  9. Reginald Selkirk says

    Helium shipping is backed up before the Strait of Hormuz?
    Let me tell you about my daring plan to smuggle helium out of Qatar – in a balloon!

    Oh, they blew up the helium plant?
    Never mind.

  10. Dibwys says

    A week before Trump attacked Iran I was happy that gas had finally gone down to $3.89. Now it is over $5.00. I would be delighted to be paying $3.89 again! (I would be even more delighted to have an electric car and a place to plug it in, but so it goes.)

  11. Snarki, child of Loki says

    Just fill your party balloons with HYDROGEN!
    What could possibly go wrong?

    (NO, you can’t have birthday candles on your cake, you dangerously crazy person! Oh, the humanity!)

  12. numerobis says

    raven: ah, ok, that makes sense.

    Anyway, have no fear, the price will rise another dollar or so in the coming weeks. It’s your patriotic duty to the US to enjoy that. No matter where in the world you live.

  13. Dr. Pablito says

    Research physicists and tech industry people have been crabbing about helium supplies and warning everyone for decades now. Decades. The US maintained a strategic helium reserve since the middle of the Cold War, but then a bunch of republicans decided we needed to privatize it with the and sell it off, which finally got finalized in 1996 with the Helium Privatization Act. The last remnants were sold off in 2024. There was a little blurp of protest after September 11, when intelligence/counterterrorism people realized that the nation might need better cargo scanning to search for dirty bombs, which might need a whole lot of truck container-sized gas-filled proportional counters, which might need a metric fuckton of helium. But nothing stopped the drive to privatize this valuable public resource. Oh well. Who could possibly have foreseen and all.

  14. numerobis says

    markmckee: in this specific case, reducing the use of fossil fuels isn’t going to save helium supplies — quite the opposite, it will reduce them. Sulfur as well. They are byproducts of the refining process; less refining, less byproducts.

    Once we stop mining for natural gas, we’ll need to start mining for helium directly. Or find alternatives to helium.

  17. astringer says

    Snarki, child of Loki @11

    What could possibly go wrong?

    Well, nothing really. Hydrogen, like rubber or wood, does indeed burn (not explode) but if you don’t set fire to it, then you can use in,… balloons: from
    Weather balloon

    The balloon is usually filled with hydrogen, though helium – a more expensive, but viable option nonetheless – is also frequently used.

    Note the word ‘usually’. But but but… Hindenburg etc etc Well, thermite etc etc… let’s not derail the thread down that rabbit hole.

  19. astringer says

    artypay alloonsbay

    quoting Sprant Flere-Imsaho Wu-Handrahen Xato Trabiti for truth

  20. says

    I remember there was a helium shortage during my PhD, around 2012. We used liquid helium in our research, and the shortage could be a blocker. It was pretty hard to understand why (we were physicists, not economics!), but it had something to do with the Helium Privatization Act mentioned upthread in #13. Despite the intention being to privatize helium, the policy involved selling off the national helium reserve at clearance prices, which discouraged the private industry from building up production. So the policy basically screwed it up.

  23. moarscienceplz says

    “Once we stop mining for natural gas, we’ll need to start mining for helium directly.”
    I would think it is possible to drill into NG formations, separate the He from the NG, pump the NG back where it came from, and then seal the well.
    Also, I think it is quite likely we have already found formations that have commercial quantities of He but little NG that have been ignored. My father once worked on a NG survey ship in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s. During his time there they found only one salt dome which turned out to have no NG, but nobody cared to mention if it was full of Helium. If it was gas-tight, it probably was, and still is.

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