Feature

In January 2009, around 130 delegates attended the first ever South American industrial gases conference in Santiago, Chile.

The Middle East is a region that remains an investment target for major gas companies and regional players alike, despite a significant downturn in mature gas markets elsewhere. In the Middle East, investment in oil and gas segments, and in...

Have your customers been complaining about the high price of helium? This is a big concern at ULVAC (www.ulvac. com), an international corporation that designs, manufactures, and markets helium recovery and reuse systems.

“On March 11, 1968, a NASA subcontractor shipped a cryogenic oxygen tank to a California assembly plant, where it was installed into a spacecraft for an upcoming mission,” wrote author Norman Augustine.

Simple, small, smooth, inert, and lighter than air, helium is especially useful to anyone that needs to make a small molecule transfer in their work process. This tiny and inert molecule is ideal for leak detection.

During 2006 and 2007, worldwide helium supply was very tightly balanced with demand and remained that way for the first three quarters of 2008.

In October, after being closed for repairs for nearly a year, the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will start-up again and the search for the smallest known particles in the universe will resume (see “Particles Complete First Circuit at CERN,” CGI, October...

This report, our fourth in a series of articles on activity based business analysis and performance for US gases and welding distributors, examines distribution costs and improving distribution efficiency through Activity Based Costing (ABC).

Manufacturing and selling highpurity specialty gases requires complex resources and represents a significant investment for industrial gas distributors.