Balloon/helium Gas

[miltonbentley]

I know it was a thread on here a few months ago but I cannot find it.

Does anyone know where I can buy balloon/helium gas in town?

Thanks

[Tywais]

I know it was a thread on here a few months ago but I cannot find it.

This one? > http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?sh...3&hl=helium

Not too many responses though. Might keep in mind post #4 - re: Hydrogen.

[miltonbentley]

That's the one Tywais thanks although no answers.

I will avoid trying to recreate the Hindenburg disaster over CM

[iainiain101]

Consumers feeling the helium squeeze

The gas that floats balloons also powers industrial and scientific projects. And it's disappearing fast.

By Bob Secter | Tribune staff reporter

November 5, 2007

Helium is the talk of the party balloon industry these days, and it is not a discussion being carried out in high-pitched giggles.

The second most plentiful element in the universe is suddenly in short supply on this planet, and that means soaring prices for a lot of things, balloons included.

"Some customers have told me they're just not going to sell balloons anymore because they can't get helium," said Chicago party wholesaler Lee Kaufman. "Everybody's scrambling."

As raw materials crises go, the helium shortage clearly takes a back seat to the global oil crunch. But the repercussions go well beyond the cost of decorating for birthdays or bar mitzvahs, while also shining a light on an obscure federal helium program that has proved critical to feeding the world's growing appetite.

To most of us, helium is just a novelty gas that floats blimps, bobs huge latex whales over car dealers and when inhaled makes your voice sound like Daffy Duck's. (That, by the way, is a really bad idea that could lead to a collapsed lung, experts say.)

But demand for the gas has taken off in industry and scientific research in recent years, and the helium squeeze is being felt everywhere from university physics labs to plants in India, China, Taiwan and Korea that make today's hottest consumer products. Japanese helium suppliers recently warned customers in the electronics industry to prepare for supply cuts of up to 30 percent.

Helium is less dense than air, which explains why it makes balloons rise and voices squeak. Sound waves travel faster through it.

It is also noncombustible and can be liquefied to temperatures approaching absolute zero, properties that render it ideal for cooling metals that produce superconductivity or in processes that throw off a lot of heat. It is used to make flat-panel TVs, semiconductors, optical fibers and medical MRIs, and it toughens industrial welds. NASA uses a full train-car load to pressurize a liquid fuel rocket.

Though it plans to get out of the business, the U.S. government is the world's No. 1 source, sucking helium out of a Texas reservoir it began filling after World War I when dirigibles were thought to be the coming thing in transportation and warfare.

That stockpile will be empty in a decade, and new overseas sources have been slow to develop. "We're pedaling as fast as we can here, but we just can't produce enough," said Leslie Theiss, manager of the Federal Helium Reserve near Amarillo. "One-third of the world's helium comes from our little place here. That's kind of frightening."

In today's increasingly interdependent global marketplace, the balloon business finds itself at the bottom of the helium supply chain. What began as spot shortages last year have grown chronic this year, said Kaufman, president of the International Balloon Association, a party industry trade group.

Kaufman is also co-owner of M.K. Brody Co., a party wholesaler on West Randolph Street, which often goes through 100 cylinders of helium in a week. The firm's distributor recently put it on a weekly allotment of just 33 cylinders.

A standard tank with enough helium to fill 400 average-size balloons cost $40 five years ago but $88 today, Kaufman said. And he's been told to expect another 50 percent price hike before Christmas.

Cindi Cronin, who runs a Northwest Side party decor business, said it's become kind of a scavenger hunt lately to find helium. To stretch her supplies and save money, Cronin has started diluting the helium in balloon decorations with 40 percent air. "They still float, but not as long," she explained.

Helium is abundant but unreachable in space, a byproduct of the nuclear fusion of stars. On earth, however, it may be the Rodney Dangerfield of elements, not getting the respect it deserves and serving as fodder for a myriad of lame science jokes:

"Have you heard the one about the chemist who was reading a book about helium and just couldn't put it down?"

It is locked largely in natural-gas deposits and typically found only at trace levels too expensive to strip out and refine.

By a quirk of geology, however, some natural-gas fields in this country are blessed with robust helium concentrations. And that has made the U.S. to helium production what Saudi Arabia is to oil.

Some of the richest sources are in the Texas Panhandle, and that is where the federal government began stockpiling the gas in 1925, long before the rest of the world took much notice of helium.

The Texas reservoir is in a geologic structure called the Bush Dome, which is not named for those Texas Bushes. The dome lies beneath the site of a ranch once owned by William Henry Bush, a 19th Century Chicago haberdasher whose father-in-law in DeKalb held the patent on a new fencing product called barbed wire. Bush was dispatched to the rangeland around Amarillo to test its effectiveness.

In the 1990s, Congress decided the government should get out of the helium business. Federal law requires the stockpile to be completely sold off in about 10 years, though it might be depleted by then anyway.

While exploration for new sources continues in several parts of the world, for the most part private industry has been slow to pick up the slack. New production facilities in the Middle East have been plagued with problems and not produced hoped-for yields.

"Demand is increasing overseas and people are starting to get nervous," said Maura Garvey, director of market research for Cryogas International, a Massachusetts-based trade journal that closely follows helium markets. She predicts helium supplies will remain tight through at least 2010 and possibly well beyond.

After that the picture is unclear. There is no practical way to create new helium, and back in Amarillo, Theiss fears the day of reckoning for world supplies may be coming faster than for oil or other nonrenewable commodities.

And that could take the air out of many birthday parties.

"To our knowledge, nothing has been discovered to date that has the reserves we have here," she said.

"Exports have increased 50 percent in the last five years. If you've got a finite amount and a lot more suddenly starts going overseas, do the math. It's not going to be good when we're done here."

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[p1p]

Try the gas supplier about three doors up from Mikes on Chang Moi road.

[altman]

Try the gas supplier about three doors up from Mikes on Chang Moi road.

that's the one i would say to try as well.

chang moi rd is on the east-outside of the moat and is identified easily by the 'mike's burgers' stand on the corner. on the same side of the street and just a couple of doors down from there is an industrial/hospital gas supplier. i have not seen helium in his shop but i suspect he can get it fairly easily. probably a good idea to know what it is called in thai or have someone write it on a piece of paper as i don't think he speaks english.

[pumpuiman]

I attended a temple fair in my wifes village. There was a vendor selling balloons on long strings for the kids.

I thought I would show off, and inhale some helium and make the kids laugh.

As I put the balloon to my mouth and inhaled, a look of horror came over the vendors face.....he was using PROPANE to fill the balloons

My wife frantically translated this to me as I was doing my Donald Duck impression, and noticing a strange taste in my mouth.

I lived....thank God I wasn't smoking at the time.

Dozens of kids at the fair were happily playing with their bombs at the fair.....no wonder he put such long strings on the balloons.

incredible.

[miltonbentley]

I attended a temple fair in my wifes village. There was a vendor selling balloons on long strings for the kids.

I thought I would show off, and inhale some helium and make the kids laugh.

As I put the balloon to my mouth and inhaled, a look of horror came over the vendors face.....he was using PROPANE to fill the balloons

My wife frantically translated this to me as I was doing my Donald Duck impression, and noticing a strange taste in my mouth.

I lived....thank God I wasn't smoking at the time.

Dozens of kids at the fair were happily playing with their bombs at the fair.....no wonder he put such long strings on the balloons.

incredible.

glad you survived PPM.

Found a supplier but he'd wouldn't let me hire the gear just supply the balloons. I wait with great anticipation to see how he will deliver 100.