no more helium??

[tommy2069]

i went to pay on my account today at the lws and was told they might stop selling helium something about the supplyers has anyone else heard anything about this? this would really put a damper on my stainles steel work for sure . could be just a rumor of maybe not.

[vin-man welding]

some smaller LWS's just can't cover the huge increase in the price of H. i asked my LWS about it.. good luck getting balloons filled

[shovelon]

i went to pay on my account today at the lws and was told they might stop selling helium something about the supplyers has anyone else heard anything about this? this would really put a damper on my stainles steel work for sure . could be just a rumor of maybe not.

Is your LWS Airgas?

[Gunner12R]

My supplier told me over two months ago that he simply couldn't get it because there was NONE to be had in the US. I thought he was just Bull ****ting me and since my Dynasty350 has enough balls to not require any fore the things I weld I wasn't too concerned.. Looks like he was shooting me strait.. Hmm

[H80N]

My supplier told me over two months ago that he simply couldn't get it because there was NONE to be had in the US. I thought he was just Bull ****ting me and since my Dynasty350 has enough balls to not require any fore the things I weld I wasn't too concerned.. Looks like he was shooting me strait.. Hmm

Here is a little broader perspective on this situation and an interesting outlook…

this first one has a number of embedded hotlinks that are pretty informative... and IMHO worth reading...

http://fthats.wordpress.com/2012/01/...-2012-edition/

Helium being a recoverable byproduct of natural gas wells…. Would make one think since natural gas exploration and production is reaching an all time high…… maybe there is no real shortage..

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/o...articles/doh02

Change in production outlook…. From byproduct to primary product….

http://rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=112735


thought you might find this stuff interesting….

Some folks will never allow a few facts to interrupt a good panic….

[old jupiter]

Very interesting links; just scanned 'em quick, but will read them later.

The part about selling off the national helium reserve really hacks me off. Congressmen always loved to point at the helium reserve (which has no lobby) as the prototypical example of government waste . . . while quietly voting in enormously larger pork projects that always have lots of lobbyists and campaign funds and votes attached. Flag-wavers are always telling us how this is the greatest country in the world (not that they have ever been anywhere, outside of maybe a drunken week of R and R in Bangkok when they were 20 years old), and maybe it is but the operation of our Congress is blatantly corrupt. Anyway, it seems to me the country ought to maintain strategic reserves of not only helium, petroleum, and uranium, but everything that we might need if we got in a jam. Sure it will cost something, but we maintain a huge military establishment already, and having strategic reserves of industrial materials, foodstuffs, etc., are certainly in the interest of the national security which Congress is constitutionally charged to maintain. It's a basic survivalist principle; were none of those people ever Boy Scouts ("BE PREPARED")? (End rant).

I read that in North Dakota they are flaring off the gas because they haven't yet made provision for capturing/storing/transporting it. What a waste of an irreplaceable resource!

[H80N]

i went to pay on my account today at the lws and was told they might stop selling helium something about the supplyers has anyone else heard anything about this? this would really put a damper on my stainles steel work for sure . could be just a rumor of maybe not.

And besides a good scare story can often be used to justify a radical price increase....HHHMMMMmmm... think about it...

[foreverAstudent]

i went to pay on my account today at the lws and was told they might stop selling helium something about the supplyers has anyone else heard anything about this? this would really put a damper on my stainles steel work for sure . could be just a rumor of maybe not.

I don't think its a rumor. The shielding gas suppliers in my area discourage the use of helium, only a few in my area still actually sell it. When I asked them why they said that there's only 200 yrs worth of helium left on Earth and they use helium for a lot of stuff other than shielding gas, so they want people to stop using it for shielding gas. I guess we're going to have to get it from outer space in the future.

[1930case]

They don't want to stop using it for shielding gas, but balloons etc are a total waste.

Cylinder gas providers need helium for mixed gas, and many don't service new accounts.

Medical uses such as MRIs of course have priority.

The Helium Privatisation Act is yet another symptom of the desire by business to destroy government to make greater profit while pretending they are for the virtues of a free market.

Strategic reserves were an obvious idea during the Cold War, but since the Commies turned into Capitalists and joined the team, the Capitalists who run the US are back to putting themselves before their own country.

[tommy2069]

no my supllyer is nws they ahev been pretty good and can get anything i want when i ask for it but they just recently told me abut this doa any of you know of a substitute for tri mix for stain less???

Is your LWS Airgas?

[shovelon]

no my supllyer is nws they ahev been pretty good and can get anything i want when i ask for it but they just recently told me abut this doa any of you know of a substitute for tri mix for stain less???

Why don't you try 98AR/2Co2, commonly called stainmix?

[old jupiter]

The Helium Privatisation Act is yet another symptom of the desire by business to destroy government to make greater profit while pretending they are for the virtues of a free market.

Strategic reserves were an obvious idea during the Cold War, but since the Commies turned into Capitalists and joined the team, the Capitalists who run the US are back to putting themselves before their own country.

They aren't capitalists, Case. They are corporatists. Their motivation in life is to get every advantage they can from government while maximizing their stock price so that they can retire with gigantic personal windfalls, having off-shored and out-sourced the jobs of their workers (all the time proclaiming that, "Our employees are our most valuable asset!). The REAL capitalists are right here on this forum, running shops and trucks, and trying to avoid being screwed by the system.

Unfortunately, having only 200 years of helium left sounds like forever to people in this short-sighted culture. So fill all the party balloons you want, and to h--- with anybody who follows us.

[H80N]

They aren't capitalists, Case. They are corporatists. Their motivation in life is to get every advantage they can from government while maximizing their stock price so that they can retire with gigantic personal windfalls, having off-shored and out-sourced the jobs of their workers (all the time proclaiming that, "Our employees are our most valuable asset!). The REAL capitalists are right here on this forum, running shops and trucks, and trying to avoid being screwed by the system.

Unfortunately, having only 200 years of helium left sounds like forever to people in this short-sighted culture. So fill all the party balloons you want, and to h--- with anybody who follows us.

Yawn.... Really??

in 200 years we will be mining helium on the Sun.... it is nearly 25 percent helium..... and besides we actually have no way of knowing at this time what the real helium reserves on earth are....considering that it is harvested as a byproduct of natural gas production... and that we are experiencing the greatest period of exploration and production of natural gas in human history.... natural gas can contain as much as 7percent helium, it is separated by the fractional distillation process...

but.... I am re assured that chicken little is not dead after all......

Here is a link confirming the Sun's helium content...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun

BTW... Helium being an inert gas is a recyclable resource .... using the liquid air process... it just needs to become economicaly feasable... nothing happens to it... that is why it is classed as inert... it can be recycled over and over forever.....

BBTW.... there are serious proposals out there right now to mine helium on the moon....

[old jupiter]

X2 for Shovelon and the StainMix. Go to Ed Craig's Welding Reality site and you can read his opinion that StainMix, which he developed, is superior to the mostly-helium stainless tri-mixes.
He does say that for doing aluminum-MIG over 1/4", a 60/40 Argon/Helium mix is best.


(What follows is continued editorializing in answer to our esteemed "H80N", and may be best ignored).

When I was in college in the '60s, undersea mining of ferro-manganese nodules, which lie about on the sea floor like potatos waiting to be gathered up, was spoken of as being right around the corner by the same Popular Science seers that now tell us how we're going to mine the sun, the moon, Mars, asteroids, . . . (yawn). Why aren't there fleets of ocean mining ships forty five years later? Because market prices do not yet justify it.

Odds suggest that there is other life in the universe, even other intelligent life, even life more intelligent than we are (not difficult in my case!), and more technically capable. So why haven't real aliens come to visit us? Economics!
Space travel is absurdly uneconomical. And if we can't economically justify the sea-mining of manganese nodules yet, space mining will be astronomically more expensive.

Eventually we'll have to do all of the above, if the ten billion of us still insist on living in modern technological ways. Even though we get better at pulling a few more goodies out of played-out holes, and at making new holes in inconveniently-expensive locales in sub-arctic realms and miles under the ocean, more and more of us insist on using our share of the goodies. So certainly you are right. When we have sucked out so much of the goodies that their scarcity and market value justify mining in outer space, some future generation will have to begin doing that.

Lucky them! Or maybe they will feel rather like we do when we regard the disappearance of the Grand Banks codfish runs or the Pacific Coast salmon runs, or the ever-dropping Oglalla Aquifer and Colorado River, or any kind of decent tight-grained, knot-free wood, or just a whole lot of other things we could name.

I'm a conservative, an old-style one, not one of the current frauds calling themselves conservative, and conservatives of the Fifties believed in . . . conservation, of natural resources and other desireables. Therefore, I'd like to see helium conserved, not just blown off into the air, before it gets so expensive that we have to send tankers to the sun to get more of it.

[JSFAB]

When I was in college in the '60s, undersea mining of ferro-manganese nodules, which lie about on the sea floor like potatos waiting to be gathered up, was spoken of as being right around the corner by the same Popular Science seers that now tell us how we're going to mine the sun, the moon, Mars, asteroids, . . . (yawn). Why aren't there fleets of ocean mining ships forty five years later? Because market prices do not yet justify it.

Yeah, and I can remember coming of age in the '70's, if I recall correctly the earth was going to become completely out of oil in 10 years.

This was from the smartest, most respected scientists at the time. Thank God we had a few dumb scientists and engineers who didn't listen.