Question

Name the main commercial source of helium.

Answer 1

Hint: Helium is a noble gas which is produced underground by the radioactive decay of heavy elements. It can be produced by liquefying and separating the component gases.

Complete step by step answer:
- Helium is generally produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing.

The First step of extracting helium from natural gas is pretreating. Pretreating means the gas is pressurized to about 54 atm of pressure, then it flows through scrubber where it is subjected with spray of monoethanolamine which is used to absorb the carbon dioxide.
In the next step any heavy hydrocarbons are collected on the bed of the activated carbon. Through this process the activated carbon gets recharged and now the gas stream contains mostly methane and nitrogen, with small amounts of helium, hydrogen, and neon.
Next step is to obtain helium gas from natural gas and this can be achieved by a cryogenic piping system. The natural gas is pressurized, and then passed through a sieve. During this scrubbing process, helium is separated from natural gas so that only crude helium remains.
After this whole process, helium is distributed either as gas at normal temperature or as a liquid at very low temperature.
Therefore, the main commercial source of helium is natural gas.

Note: Some people thought that we can also obtain helium from air, as it is constituent of air. Yes, they can but remember we always follow that process which is economically feasible. Helium is present in very small amounts in the air and It costs around 10,000 times more to extract helium from air than it does from rocks and natural gas reserves.