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Every year, India imports helium worth Rs 55,000 crores from the U.S. to meet its needs
Helium in America
- Some scientists and geologists started looking for helium underground – they guessed it may be present there by analysing debris from volcanic eruptions.
- From the oil drilling operation in Dexter, Kansas, in the U.S., chemists Hamilton Cady and David McFarland discovered the presence of helium in natural gas.
- They further went on to discover that despite its overall rarity, helium was concentrated in large quantities under the American Great Plains.
- The U.S. became the most important exporter of helium across the world.
- It was soon realised that U.S. was also the biggest store house of helium.
India's helium requirement
Every year, India imports helium worth Rs 55,000 crores from the U.S. to meet its needs.
Extracting helium in India
- Around 1956, as vice chancellor of Viswabharati University, Professor Satyendranath Bose once visited a village called Bakreswar (near Santiniketan) where he found water boiling naturally in a small tank.
- Satyen Bose was keen to analyse the natural gas that came out of the tank.
- 1.8% of the natural gas emanating from the boiling water was helium.
- The area called Rajmahal volcanic basin around Bakreswar and nearby Tantloi, now in Jharkhand, were floating on an ocean of helium
- India’s Rajmahal volcanic basin is the store house of helium trapped for billions years, since the very birth of our Earth from the Sun.
Helium and it's application
- Helium is colourless, odourless, tasteless, inert and a noble gas.
- Yet, it finds many applications, mainly in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, in rockets and in nuclear reactors.
Source: The Hindu
