Reducing the Environmental Footprint of Gas Chromatography: Practical Lessons from Helium and Hydrogen
A life cycle assessment finds that gas chromatography's environmental impact hinges on method time and power.
In mid-March 2026, this became very concrete in our Occupational and Environmental Medicine laboratory at Linköping University Hospital in Sweden. We received an invoice for the cylinder of GC–MS-grade helium priced several times higher than the amount paid under our 2022 procurement. The invoice arrived before the latest Gulf escalation. Within days, disruption to Qatari natural-gas processing again highlighted how tightly helium availability is linked to a few global production hubs. Reuters reported that the interruption affected a market with limited spare capacity, long-distance liquid-helium logistics, and strong dependence on Qatar, which accounts for close to one-third of global helium production.1