Development of cheap oxygen device holds hope Bottlenecks
Medical oxygen should not be a luxury, writes David FairenJimenez.
PEOPLE might once have considered oxygen a human right. But the pandemic has revealed that access to oxygen — in a pure form, for medical use — is a luxury in most low and middleincome countries.
Getting access to pure oxygen for medical treatments is a complicated, expensive and often very dangerous business. The current situation in India is a harsh reminder of this issue. The second wave of Covid19 has hit the country hard, and the total number of deaths has just passed the 200,000 mark. Oxygen is in short supply.
Because of the current emergency, Indian citizens have turned to the black market to buy oxygen way above its regular price.
This has happened partly due to the way oxygen is produced, stored and transported around the world. That’s why scientists like me are working to find a cheaper alternative.
Oxygen is mostly obtained from liquefied air. Engineers turn the air we breathe into a liquid, using a combination of processes that cool down gases until they condensate. Once they’ve managed to liquefy the mix, they use distillation — the same process used to make whisky and gin — to separate air into its different components, oxygen among them.
This process requires enormous amounts of energy and huge industrial facilities, so it’s limited to just a few areas in the world, most of them in the global north. Liquid oxygen must be stored and transported under great pressure, creating serious logistical issues and safety concerns — oxygen is really explosive.
This means the main bottleneck of oxygen production is, precisely, bottles. The US relies on heavyduty pipes to transport pressurised oxygen. In Europe, transport is mainly through liquid oxygen carried in big tanks. For lowerincome countries, distribution is done in bottles.
But the oxygen bottle market is cornered by only a handful of chemical companies. Using bottles also adds another layer of safety concerns, as handling them correctly requires several precautionary measures and proper training. Developing countries therefore lack both the infrastructure required to produce liquid oxygen and that to easily and cheaply transport it to a hospital.