Then, the crude helium is purified through another cooling and filtering process that results in a form of helium that's more than 99 percent pure. Finally, a process called cryogenic processing is used to cool the gas and remove the methane that makes up most of it, leaving behind a crude form of helium that is about 50 to 70 percent pure, with small amounts of argon, neon and hydrogen making up the rest.
This is done through industrial processes that filter other impurities, such as water, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide from the gas. There has to be a certain amount of helium in the natural gas - at least 0.3 percent by volume – to justify all the trouble of separating it from natural gas. That gives us a supply that we can use for blowing up balloons, as well as for a wide variety of other industrial processes, ranging from arc welding to MRIs to manufacturing silicon chips for computers. įortunately for us, helium also gets into the natural gas that oil and gas drillers extract from the ground for use as fuel. Those particles pick up electrons from the environment around them and turn into helium, which gradually rises up through the crust and is emitted into the atmosphere, where it keeps rising until it gets into space. The byproduct of these reactions are tiny fragments called a-particles, which consist of two neutrons and two protons. Deep inside the Earth, radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium decay and turn into other elements.
The naturally occurring helium on Earth, though, comes from a different sort of process. Helium is abundant in space, where it's produced as a product of the fusion reaction inside stars such as the sun.
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