Chemistry departments in the UK have told Chemistry World that they are not currently facing any major issues securing helium yet, despite continued disruption to global supplies stemming from the US–Iran war. Many attribute this to helium recovery systems, which allows departments to continue to run various analytical equipment in a business-as-usual scenario.
The ongoing Gulf conflict has resulted in attacks on Qatar’s Ras Laffan natural gas plant in March that have taken around 30% of the world’s helium supply off the market, disrupting global supplies. Liquid helium is critical to cool superconducting magnets in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machines, and as it is inert it is one of the carrier gases of choice for samples in certain mass spectrometry columns.
‘We haven’t been affected so far by the conflict in the Middle East,’ says Mahmoud Akhtar, who manages the NMR instruments at Cardiff University, UK. He adds that the department recently placed an order for 100 litres of helium, which arrived at the end of last month. Equally, Craig Butts, head of chemistry at the University of Bristol, UK, affirms that the conflict isn’t ‘impacting us at this stage’. ‘But we do have buffering from shortages under normal circumstances,’ he adds.
While supply of helium isn’t necessarily an issue, Huw Williams at the University of Nottingham notes that suppliers have increased the price of helium by around £2 per litre. He declined to say what the university was currently paying for helium. ‘We would typically be using 4500 litres [of helium] as a department, so it ends up being a few thousand [additional] pounds if we were buying all our liquid in,’ he says.
Williams adds that the department is quite fortunate as they have a helium recycling system that allows them to re-use around 80% of the liquid helium. Other universities that Chemistry World spoke to said that such systems have also helped shelter their own chemistry departments from helium shortages. This includes Edinburgh, Lancaster, Leeds and Manchester. These systems are usually either in the chemistry department itself or connected with nearby physics buildings, which tend to carry out more experiments that use liquid helium.
Chemistry leaders at Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Edinburgh, Durham and Manchester all told Chemistry World that they do not currently face any prospect of a helium shortage.
NMR machines require frequent re-filling, around every four to six months for a 400MHz NMR, says Williams. Recovering used helium ensures that such instruments can be kept running to prevent damage to the magnet inside the machine, which would otherwise cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and several months to fix.
Andrew Hall, who manages the NMR equipment at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that the helium recovery system that they installed in 2017 initially cost around £250,000. He explains that the setup is connected to six NMR machines and two mass spectrometers that use liquid helium, while an NMR spectrometer in a different part of the building remains unconnected. ‘So that one is still vulnerable to price changes and [supply issues],’ he says.
As the liquid helium increases in temperature, copper pipes transfer the boil off from the spectrometers to a large, sealed plastic bag that runs around the outside of the room. ‘It takes about a week to fill these gas bags,’ says Hall. ‘We then compress that gas into a gas cylinder stored outside.’
Since installing the machine, Hall estimates that the department has collected nearly 19,000m3 of helium gas – the equivalent of approximately 2 million party balloons. This has reduced the amount of helium that the department buys per year by 89%, saving around £77,000 annually. He adds that this means the recovery system paid for itself in about three years.
Aside from financial benefits, Hall says that installing a recovery system was also a move to make the department more sustainable. ‘Helium is non-renewable. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever,’ he says. Capturing and liquefying the used helium reduces CO2 emissions from buying the gas by around two-thirds or 540kg per year.
He adds that the electricity they use to recover the helium is currently supplied by the Scottish electricity grid, which generates electricity largely from wind and solar. Other helium recovery setups at other universities may not lower emissions as much, depending on electricity source.
Maintaining the recovery setup can also be challenging, but ‘the amount of effort it requires to run the system is similar to if you had an extra spectrometer to look after’, says Hall. ‘[However], if we didn’t have this equipment, we would be feeling very nervous about [the current] situation,’ he says.
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