Go Navy (sorry Army)

I think I’ve alluded to this previously, but unless you’re an analytical chemist, specialty gases themselves aren’t what you would call glamorous or exciting. Fact is they can be downright boring. But the use of specialty gases, now that’s a different story–sometimes.

U.S. Navy MZ-3A Airship (photo: freemilitaryphotos.com)

This month Air Liquide opened a new cylinder gas depot in Mobile, Alabama to better serve the needs of our many Gulf Coast customers. Many of these customers use our gases for environmental purposes involving air quality improvement. One customer however, is using our helium gas to improve water quality: namely helping to clean up the disaster in the Gulf.

The first  customer to be serviced out of our new facility was none other than the U.S. Navy. We supplied their manned 178-foot air ship with enough helium to keep it aloft over the Gulf of Mexico to help locate oil slicks, then hover over them long enough to allow skimmer boats to reach the location for cleanup.

Due to the amount of time it spends flying over the Gulf, the blimp uses the contents of 40 to 60 helium cylinders each week. And that, my friend, is a whole lotta party balloons. The helium for this project is supplied by our Baton Rouge facility. Besides “zepplin grade” helium, Air Liquide supplies laboratories with ALPHAGAZ™ ultra high purity helium used mostly for sensitive laboratory instruments and also electronic grade with purity as high as 99.9995%.

Air Liquide/Scott Specialty Gases has historically been a supplier of specialty gases to the U.S. Navy. Our cylinder gases have been used aboard their nuclear submarines while patrolling beneath the seas. But that’s another interesting story.

The difference between specialty and industrial gases

Specialty vs. Industrial

When it comes to compressed gases, there is often confusion over the difference between industrial gases (sometimes referred to as commodity or bulk gases) and specialty gases (sometimes referred to as cylinder gases, although industrial gases can also be supplied in cylinders). The Compressed Gas Association (CGA), who sets standards to which suppliers of all types of compressed gases conform, defines its mission as being ‘dedicated to the development and promotion of safety standards and safe practices in the industrial gas industry. In a broad sense, in that most compressed gases are used for some sort of industrial application, all could be considered to be industrial gases. So to define the true difference between industrial gases and specialty gases, one must look beyond the application to other factors such as complexity, level of purity and certainty of composition.

According to the CGA compressed gases are often grouped into five loosely defined families: atmospheric; fuel; refrigerant; poisonous; and those having no obvious ties to any of the other families. Assignment to these families is somewhat arbitrary and typically based on the origin, use or chemical structure of a gas. Specialty gases can belong to any of these five families. Essentially, they are industrial gases taken to a higher level. The dictionary describes one of the definitions of the word specialty as: an unusual, distinctive, or superior mark or quality. Specialty gases then, can be defined as high-quality gases for specific applications that are prepared using laboratory analysis and other preparation methods in order to quantify, minimize or eliminate unknown or undesirable characteristics within the gas. Regarding specialty gas mixtures, precise blending is also necessary to achieve very specific concentration values for the components contained within the mixture.