🏭 The Column: March 14, 2025

Good morning. In case you have noticed, I’ve been advertising for the World Petrochemical Conference by S&P Global since last November. Well, the time has finally come, and the conference is next week March 17-21st in Houston, Texas. I’ll be there—let me know if you will be too, I’d love to meet up!

Things Happened:

Making helium on purpose in Wyoming

Helium is an odd natural resource with some odd use cases, e.g. it’s critical for advanced semiconductor production as a purge gas and for etching, and for cryogenic applications like keeping the magnets in MRI machines cold. And while it’s true that most of the world’s helium comes from oil and gas, let’s not forget that it’s incidental—helium is produced by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium deep underground—some of it just gets trapped inside shale deposits instead of escaping into space. About half of that helium is recovered when natural gas is liquefied to LNG for export, and about half comes from acid gas fields (formations with high CO2 concentration) like the LaBarge Field in southwestern Wyoming (we’re talking about gas compositions that are 70% CO2, 20% methane, 8% nitrogen, and 2% helium). Exxon operates a bunch of wells in that field, but as the old federal helium reserve in Amarillo continues to be depleted (here’s some drama about that), there is now a renewed interest in valorizing more of those Wyoming acid gas fields—especially since Section 45Q of the IRA grants tax credits to companies who sequester CO2. Blue Spruce is making progress here: they just selected Honeywell’s CO2 capture technology for their upcoming helium refining facility in Wyoming, and are currently targeting start up in the second half of 2028. (It’s fun to keep scale in mind here. At peak production, the Blue Spruce project will produce about 2 large tanker trucks of liquid helium per day, or approximately 10% of global helium demand.) [LINK]

A Word From Our Sponsors:

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Other Things Happened:

Samsung just bought a 9% stake in a Norwegian electrolyzer producer. Graphitic Energy started up its methane pyrolysis pilot plant in San Antonio, Texas. OMV just secured a huge grant from the EU Innovation Fund to build a plastics pyrolysis plant to increase plastic recycling. Braven just signed an offtake agreement with BASF, so now their plastic pyrolysis product will be used at BASF’s site in Port Arthur, Texas. Saint-Gobain is going to build a new ceramic catalyst support manufacturing site in Wheatfield, New York. Wacker is going to start using biogenic carbon instead of coal for its silicon production in Norway.