Amarillo Helium Plant

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Amarillo Helium Plant, and friend, this one's worth pulling over for. Now, most folks driving through the Texas Panhandle see flat land and big sky and figure the real treasure must be somewhere else. They are mistaken.

What's beneath this ground, and what this plant does with it, puts Amarillo on a very short list of places that changed the world. The Amarillo Helium Plant is operated by the United States Bureau of Mines, and it holds a distinction that is hard to overstate. This was the first plant to produce helium from the extensive helium resources right here in the Texas Panhandle.

The first. Not one of the first. The first.

And then consider this: from 1929 until 1943, this plant furnished almost all of the world's supply of helium. Almost all of it. For fourteen years, if the world needed helium, it was largely coming from right here.

That's not a local point of pride, that's a fact with consequences that rippled out to every corner of the globe. Now, how do they actually get helium out of the ground? It's not simple, and the numbers involved are the kind that make you blink.

The plant operates around the clock, no days off, no slow Sundays. It extracts helium by liquefying natural gas and then separating the helium from it at temperatures three hundred degrees below zero. Three hundred degrees below zero.

The Panhandle summers run hot, and somewhere under the same dirt, they're working at temperatures that number cannot fully prepare you for. And the reserves. The natural reserves in these fields, and in extensions into adjacent states, contain more than ninety-five percent of the world's known supply of helium.

Ninety-five percent. The world's known supply, and almost all of it traces back to this stretch of the southern plains. This site is also home to a world renowned research center that provides fundamental data on the production and uses of helium.

Because once you have all that helium, you'd better understand what it can do. And it can do quite a lot. Lighter-than-air craft, low-temperature research, shielded-arc welding.

National defense. Nuclear energy programs. Space exploration.

Space exploration. Think on that the next time you watch a rocket climb into the sky. Some part of that story, in some form, leads back to a plant on the Texas Panhandle, running around the clock, pulling something extraordinary out of the cold dark earth.

What the marker says

This plant, operated by the United States Bureau of Mines, was the first to produce helium from the extensive helium resources in the Texas Panhandle. From 1929 until 1943, it furnished almost all of the world's supply of helium. Operating around the clock, the plant extracts helium by liquefying the natural gas and separating helium from it at temperatures 300 degrees below zero. The natural reserves in these fields and in extensions into adjacent states contain more than 95 percent of the world's known supply of helium. This is also the site of the world renowned research center which provides fundamental data on the production and uses of helium. Helium is used for a variety of purposes: lighter-than-air craft, low-temperature research, shielded-arc welding; and in national defense, nuclear energy programs and space exploration. (1965)