Air Products Opens World's Largest Helium Liquefier
Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. (Lehigh Valley, PA) says it has opened the world's largest helium liquefier at Liberal, KS. The unit processes well over 600 million scfy of helium, tripling Liberal's capacity to more than 1 billion scfy, about half the company's total helium capacity. Air Products, which engineered and installed the liquefier, says the unit strengthens its position as the world's leading producer and supplier of helium.
Air Products says global helium demand has grown at more than 8%/yr for the past 25 years, with Asian demand running at double-digit levels. Key helium applications include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems refrigerant; fiber optic production heat transfer agent; laser welding shielding gas; and semiconductor manufacture.
Liberal purifies and liquefies crude helium obtained from an adjacent natural gas processing plant owned by National Helium Corp., a subsidiary of Duke Energy Corp., and from a connecting pipeline owned and operated by the US Bureau of Land Management.
Air Products claims to have more sources of helium worldwide than any other industrial gas company. In addition to production facilities at Liberal and in the Texas Panhandle, its has other sources at Keyes, OK; La Barge, WY; and Arzew, Algeria (via the Helios joint venture with Sonatrach, the state-owned oil and gas company). In addition, Air Products operates 38 helium transfill facilities worldwide.
Edited by Alan S. Brown