I must have just been tired and not reading the recipe names clearly enough. The x-methane-reforming recipes are meant to be helium-yielding versions of methane-pre-reforming.
My (non-chemist's) understanding is the vast majority of natural gas is methane anyway, so the process is mostly just distillation? A cursory search for "methane pre reforming" only gives results related to converting methane to hydrogen, but search engines being what they are these days that's hardly conclusive. The only reason the helium generating recipes use steam in the first place is I like recipes that use steam lol, if that turned out to be realistic it's purely by accident.
Also apparently "microtolerance" is the name of a real company and not a generic word for anything extremely precise, so I need to change that as well.
e: I am getting mixed results on this last point actually, with a small number of articles using it as a generic word for anything extremely precise but most search results being for the one company, so it's not clear whether I need to change it.