India imports helium for its needs and with the U.S. appearing set to cut off exports of helium since 2021, the Indian industry stands to lose out heavily.

Helium is not just for balloons but it is the key ingredient for India’s high technology and the most sophisticated medical diagnosis.

Helium on Earth

• Helium is a chemical element with the symbol He and atomic number 2.
• It is a colourless, odourless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert, monatomic gas, the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table. Its boiling point is the lowest among all the elements.

Its discovery

• In 1906 a young Englishman by the name of Moris Travers arrived in Bangalore, to take up the position of the Director of Indian Institute of Science.
• Travers extracted helium in small quantity by heating up monazite sand abundantly available in Kerala beach, in a pioneering effort.
• Dutch physicist Kamerlingh Onnes liquefied Helium by cooling the gas to -270 degrees Celsius.
• It is known that Onnes collected helium gas from the springs of Bath in Baden Baden, Germany for his liquefaction experiment.

Helium in India

• India’s Rajmahal volcanic basin is the storehouse of helium trapped for billions of years, since the very birth of our Earth from the Sun.
• At present, researchers are mapping the Rajmahal basin extensively for future exploration and harnessing of helium.

Why India needs Helium?

• Every year, India imports helium worth Rs 55,000 crores from the U.S. to meet its needs.
• Helium is used in medicine, scientific research, for blimp inflation, party balloons as well as having welding applications.
• It finds many applications, mainly in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, in rockets and in nuclear reactors.

US monopoly in Helium

• The U.S. became the most important exporter of helium across the world.
• It was soon realized that the U.S. was also the biggest storehouse of helium.
• The US is now planning to switch off the export of helium from 2021.
• Qatar is a possible exporter but acute political and diplomatic wrangles have made Qatar unreliable.

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Scientists have found a method to mimic nature’s own process of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, namely photosynthesis, to capture excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Artificial Photosynthesis

• Artificial photosynthesis (AP) is a chemical process that mimics the natural process of photosynthesis to convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates and oxygen.
• The term artificial photosynthesis is commonly used to refer to any scheme for capturing and storing the energy from sunlight in the chemical bonds of fuel (a solar fuel).
• Photocatalytic water splitting converts water into hydrogen and oxygen and is a major research topic of artificial photosynthesis.
• Light-driven carbon dioxide reduction is another process studied that replicates natural carbon fixation.

Try this PYQ:

Which of the following adds/add carbon dioxide to the carbon cycle on the planet Earth?

1. Volcanic action
2. Respiration
3. Photosynthesis
4. Decay of organic matter

Select the correct answer using the code given below:

(a) 1 and 3 only

(b) 2 only

(c) 1, 2 and 4 only

(d) 1, 2, 3 and 4

Challenges in AP

• Research on this topic includes the engineering of enzymes and photoautotrophic microorganisms for microbial biofuel and biohydrogen production from sunlight.
• This AP harnesses solar energy and converts the captured carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide (CO), which can be used as a fuel for internal combustion engines.
• In AP, scientists are essentially conducting the same fundamental process in natural photosynthesis but with simpler nanostructures.
• However, there are plenty of hurdles to overcome as a successful catalyst to carry out AP.

What have Indian researchers achieved?

• Indian researchers have designed and fabricated an integrated catalytic system based on a metal-organic framework (MOF-808) comprising of a photosensitizer that can harness solar power and a catalytic centre that can eventually reduce CO2.
• A photosensitizer is a molecule that absorbs light and transfers the electron from the incident light into another nearby molecule.
• The scientists have immobilized a photosensitizer, which is a chemical called ruthenium bipyridyl complex ([Ru (bpy)2Cl2]) and a catalytic part which is another chemical called rhenium carbonyl complex ([Re(CO)5Cl]).
• They have fabricated it inside the nano space of a metal-organic framework for artificial photosynthesis.

Outcomes of the research

• The developed catalyst exhibited excellent visible-light-driven CO2 reduction to CO with more than 99% selectivity.
• The catalyst also oxidizes water to produce oxygen (O2).
• The Photocatalytic assembly, when assessed for CO2 reduction under direct sunlight in a water medium without any additives, showed superior performance of CO production.
• Being heterogeneous, the integrated catalytic assembly can be reused for several catalytic cycles without losing its activity.

Back2Basics:  Photosynthesis

• It is the process by which green plants and certain other organisms transform light energy into chemical energy.
• It is a process used by plants and other organisms to convert light energy into chemical energy that, through cellular respiration, can later be released to fuel the organism’s metabolic activities.
• This chemical energy is stored in carbohydrate molecules, such as sugars, which are synthesized from carbon dioxide and water – hence the name photosynthesis.

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