8 ms·

Stealing my own comment from HN on this: That article reads a lot like "Peak Oil" concerns. There is a lot of Helium available - [1] The global reserves of hel

Stealing my own comment from HN on this: That article reads a lot like "Peak Oil" concerns. There is a lot of Helium available - [1] The global reserves of helium are known to be approximately 41 billion cubic meters. Most of them lie in Qatar, Algeria, the USA and Russia. Annual global production of helium is about 175 million cubic meters, and the USA remains the largest producer. " Regardless, this is something the market can correct for very, very easily. As helium supply becomes more scarce, the price will go up, resulting in greater supply. Most of it comes from natural gas, and is so cheap [2] it's not worth capturing. Oil trades for around $100/barrel. Helium trades at $100 for a thousand cubic feet (albeit in gas form) Some of the problems with Helium is that Physics experiments use a LOT, and previously was so cheap that it wasn't worth trying to conserve. That's changing - [3] A recycling system can recapture about $12,000/year of lost helium for a single scientist. From reading articles - apparently the problems isn't so much that the cost of helium is increasing - but that it's been so cheap because of the US Natural Reserves making it completely non-competitive to capture - they are basically giving the stuff away for next to nothing. [1] http://www.gazprominfo.com/articles/helium/ http://www.gazprominfo.com/articles/helium/ [2] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/airgas-increase-prices-helium-20-164550580.html http://finance.yahoo.com/news/airgas-increase-prices-helium-... And on Friday, the bureau announced that it was raising the price for a thousand cubic feet for crude helium from $84 to $95 [3] http://www.nature.com/news/united-states-extends-life-of-helium-reserve-1.13819 http://www.nature.com/news/united-states-extends-life-of-hel...

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> Regardless, this is something the market can correct for very, very easily. This is something I don't really trust. We see that with oil and environmental concerns - when things get scarcer, subsidies start, distorting the price. Should we really put our hopes in the market, praying that it will save us?
- ghshephard 12y ago
  The many billions of dollars invested in tar-sands in Canada were a market response to the increased price of Oil. They wouldn't have existed at $25/barrel Oil, but were inspire by $75/barrel Oil. I'm strongly arguing that if the price of Helium shifts from $100/1000 Cubic feet to $1000/1000 Cubic feet, that we'll likewise see similar market responses in terms of production of Helium. And we'll see radical moves towards recycling also.
  - acjohnson55 12y ago
    And thank god for the mining of the tar sands, am I right?
    - happyscrappy 12y ago
      Can you heat your house with righteous indignation?
      - deciplex 12y ago
        Will you need to heat your house in the first place, in 100 years?
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        Do I want to heat my house that much if it means my children will die in poverty on a planet that went to hell? Maybe I'd want to at least switch to a different heat source?
        baddox 12y ago
        > Do I want to heat my house that much if it means my children will die in poverty on a planet that went to hell? Yes, you probably would, because even if you don't heat your house, it's unlikely that your individual decision will have any measurable affect on the condition of the planet in the future.
      - akgerber 12y ago
        No, but you need to heat your house a lot less if there's an economic incentive to insulate it more because fuel is less subsidized, and to design new houses to take solar heating into consideration again.
    - deciplex 12y ago
      This. It goes for fracking as well, where there are significant and real externalities wrought by these new methods of extracting resources from Earth. Companies largely aren't being made to pay them. It's true that the market does correct for the diminishing of supply somewhat with an increase in price, but this is not the only mechanism in play as the pureblood capitalists would have you believe. Rather, existing players are also using their political influence to weaken legislation that was originally designed to force companies to deal with these externalities, at least partly [1]. As a result, the true cost of these new resources is greater than it appears, and furthermore the external costs in our poorer health, the destruction of our environment, and the corruption of our political system, make up a greater portion of the total cost of the resource, than previous methods of extraction. There is no reason to believe this trend will reverse. [1] Complain all you want that this isn't "true" capitalism. I don't care. The fact is we've decided that pricing these externalities directly into the market is too hard or has too much overhead, and so we patched over it with laws. If you want to change that, go ahead and try, but don't advocate weakening legislation to force someone to deal with these externalities until after you're successful.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  Is government regulation any less of a trust game?
  - deciplex 12y ago
    I at least have a theoretical way of holding my government to account. It isn't much, but it beats trying to hold a corporation to account in a world where it is not bound by laws, or barely bound by laws.
    - moron4hire 12y ago
      Right, which is part of the reason why I call into question trust in government. You can trust a corporation to be self-serving. If you can make an economic case for a policy, then all else being equal, the firms that adopt that policy will eat the lunch of the firms that do not. But you can't trust a government to protect the best interests of the people. I think they've demonstrated on a regular basis that they generally won't. What is more often the case: a regulation coming into form to protect the consumer from the evils of corporations, or that regulation actually forming to protect an entrenched corporation against competitors? We, as a society, all make up the market. When you put a monopoly power in control over it--i.e. a government--you open the door to abuse of that power, as there is no alternative. You create a single point of failure for society.
    - baddox 12y ago
      What is your theoretical way of holding your government to account? If your answer is voting, I would ask why you think your single vote influences an election more than your individual choice whether to patronize a business.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    In principle, government has the capability to be less stupid than the market. Companies are driven by competition, which seriously limits their choices and forces them to dig us a deeper hole. The government can, in principle, just arbitrarily decide that maybe, just maybe, we need to care about surviving for longer than next fiscal quarter or at least try and not create ourselves a hell on Earth. Keep in mind that the golden age of capitalism was the beginning of Industrial Revolution - it took a lot of blood and subsequent regulations to get us to the point we're not slaving away 16hrs/day in a sweatshop only to die early because some "entrepreneur" sold us poison.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  Scarcity has little to do with subsidy in most cases. People who run extractive industries end up with a lot of money and are tied to specific geographical areas. Lobbying government for concessions is a high ROI activity, and always has been. On the other side of the coin, government can break these industries too. (And does so routinely) For example, the US/Saudi mutual strategic interest now has the Saudis pumping oil as fast as possible to hurt Russia and other players. If you're a driller in North Dakota or Alberta, you're fucked.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  I don't understand people who use subsidies and free market in the same phrase. If there are subsidies then it's pretty clear the government has gotten involved, no? Instead of worrying about "having to pass a law to ban collecting Helium" or whatever, how about you worry about having the government not give those subsidies in the first place. Wouldn't that be easier?
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    I'm not talking about hypothetical perfectly free market, that neither exists nor we'd really want to have it. I'm talking about reality - businesses in bed with politicians. Those subsidies don't get granted themselves, nor they are just whims of government officials. For businesses, it's a tool like any other, to use in competing on the market.
    - dmichulke 12y ago
      "I'm not talking about hypothetical perfectly free market, that neither exists nor we'd really want to have it. " Please do not speak for others. "businesses in bed with politicians" Isn't that a failure of the law system or, more general, "our democracy" itself? Some corrupt company in XY has no ties with you but government has (at least that's the theory). So how come government (i.e., the people there) is still getting paid by your taxes while they are clearly not acting on your behalf? Blaming capitalism is like blaming the guy who slept with your wife instead of blaming your wife (and most probably you should also blame yourself to some extent). "For businesses, it's a tool like any other, to use in competing on the market." Well, for the businesses receiving a subsidy it's clearly a tool while the businesses and people paying for it much less so. To sum up, the subsidies you talk about are neither "capitalistic" nor "democratic" so we shouldn't derive conclusions about capitalism or democracy here. We can very well derive conclusions about the current economic system called "free market" and the current political system called "democracy" but we should agree on the definition first.
- Rumford 12y ago
  Subsidies originate with government. Prices, when allowed to move freely without state interference, organically induce rationing only when necessary, and inspire the development of alternatives. This is completely natural, rational, and built in to how markets work. No need to pray.
- zo1 12y ago
  Subsidies are not a construct of a free-market, but of a state. Which can leverage vast sums of money into such a losing game (without any "market" repercussions).
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  If we wanted to, if oil was so precious, we could synthesize it from other substances. This isn't the case like with rare elements. And with most of those, even, we can recycle them indefinitely (we'll never run out of platinum). Helium literally floats away to where we can never get it again.
ptaipale 12y ago
Similar answer: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/27/what-great-helium-shortage/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/27/what-grea...
ilitirit 12y ago
> Oil trades for around $100/barrel. Wavering around $55/barrel at the moment.
Retric 12y ago
While the US dumping its helium supply was utterly stupid and distorts the market terribly. 41 billion cubic meters / 7 billion people = less than six cubic meters per person on the planet, and when it's gone it's gone. That does not sound so hot.
- rquantz 12y ago
  Yes. People who respond to shortages of non renewable resources by saying, "I'm not concerned. Actual peak oil is 40 years further down the road than these people think it is" don't seem to grasp that that is not actually a lot of time.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    This also doesn't take into account that we price helium for birthday balloons at the same price as helium for MRI machines.
    - ganeumann 12y ago
      I advocate switching to hydrogen for birthday balloons. "Blow out the candles! Blow them out, quick!"
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Completely agree that dumping the helium supply was short sighted - better approach would have been to auction it off in 5 billion cubic meters/lot, perhaps every 5 years, and let the market set a price.
sliverstorm 12y ago
At the end of the day we have to count on the market, but I still hate that the helium reserve has depressed the price so much that we are just throwing away the helium in natural gas wells.
codingdave 12y ago
Your arguments could be nitpicked, but lets skip that and just take as a given that you are 100% correct. That doesn't change the fact that helium is a non-renewable resource. Conservation makes sense. Maybe it won't matter to us today, or even in 40 years. But it will matter to someone else in 140 years. In my mind, any decisions made based on markets are a short-term strategy. If a resource is non-renewable, I prioritize conservation. Where practical, I use renewable resources.
- dbbolton 12y ago
  Let's just hope we've perfected hydrogen fusion by that time. Then we'll have as much energy and helium as we want!
  - DanOWar 12y ago
    Do you mean fission?
    - yincrash 12y ago
      You're going to split hydrogen atoms? Into what exactly?
      - jotux 12y ago
        We'll split H into three parts: |,-, and |.
  - DennisP 12y ago
    True of energy, but not of helium. Fusion produces a lot of energy from very little fuel. Running the world on fusion would supply a tiny fraction of our helium demand.
    - dbbolton 12y ago
      I was being sarcastic.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

> Regardless, this is something the market can correct for very, very easily. This is something I don't really trust. We see that with oil and environmental concerns - when things get scarcer, subsidies start, distorting the price. Should we really put our hopes in the market, praying that it will save us?

ghshephard 12y ago
The many billions of dollars invested in tar-sands in Canada were a market response to the increased price of Oil. They wouldn't have existed at $25/barrel Oil, but were inspire by $75/barrel Oil. I'm strongly arguing that if the price of Helium shifts from $100/1000 Cubic feet to $1000/1000 Cubic feet, that we'll likewise see similar market responses in terms of production of Helium. And we'll see radical moves towards recycling also.
- acjohnson55 12y ago
  And thank god for the mining of the tar sands, am I right?
  - happyscrappy 12y ago
    Can you heat your house with righteous indignation?
    - deciplex 12y ago
      Will you need to heat your house in the first place, in 100 years?
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Do I want to heat my house that much if it means my children will die in poverty on a planet that went to hell? Maybe I'd want to at least switch to a different heat source?
      - baddox 12y ago
        > Do I want to heat my house that much if it means my children will die in poverty on a planet that went to hell? Yes, you probably would, because even if you don't heat your house, it's unlikely that your individual decision will have any measurable affect on the condition of the planet in the future.
    - akgerber 12y ago
      No, but you need to heat your house a lot less if there's an economic incentive to insulate it more because fuel is less subsidized, and to design new houses to take solar heating into consideration again.
  - deciplex 12y ago
    This. It goes for fracking as well, where there are significant and real externalities wrought by these new methods of extracting resources from Earth. Companies largely aren't being made to pay them. It's true that the market does correct for the diminishing of supply somewhat with an increase in price, but this is not the only mechanism in play as the pureblood capitalists would have you believe. Rather, existing players are also using their political influence to weaken legislation that was originally designed to force companies to deal with these externalities, at least partly [1]. As a result, the true cost of these new resources is greater than it appears, and furthermore the external costs in our poorer health, the destruction of our environment, and the corruption of our political system, make up a greater portion of the total cost of the resource, than previous methods of extraction. There is no reason to believe this trend will reverse. [1] Complain all you want that this isn't "true" capitalism. I don't care. The fact is we've decided that pricing these externalities directly into the market is too hard or has too much overhead, and so we patched over it with laws. If you want to change that, go ahead and try, but don't advocate weakening legislation to force someone to deal with these externalities until after you're successful.
moron4hire 12y ago
Is government regulation any less of a trust game?
- deciplex 12y ago
  I at least have a theoretical way of holding my government to account. It isn't much, but it beats trying to hold a corporation to account in a world where it is not bound by laws, or barely bound by laws.
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    Right, which is part of the reason why I call into question trust in government. You can trust a corporation to be self-serving. If you can make an economic case for a policy, then all else being equal, the firms that adopt that policy will eat the lunch of the firms that do not. But you can't trust a government to protect the best interests of the people. I think they've demonstrated on a regular basis that they generally won't. What is more often the case: a regulation coming into form to protect the consumer from the evils of corporations, or that regulation actually forming to protect an entrenched corporation against competitors? We, as a society, all make up the market. When you put a monopoly power in control over it--i.e. a government--you open the door to abuse of that power, as there is no alternative. You create a single point of failure for society.
  - baddox 12y ago
    What is your theoretical way of holding your government to account? If your answer is voting, I would ask why you think your single vote influences an election more than your individual choice whether to patronize a business.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  In principle, government has the capability to be less stupid than the market. Companies are driven by competition, which seriously limits their choices and forces them to dig us a deeper hole. The government can, in principle, just arbitrarily decide that maybe, just maybe, we need to care about surviving for longer than next fiscal quarter or at least try and not create ourselves a hell on Earth. Keep in mind that the golden age of capitalism was the beginning of Industrial Revolution - it took a lot of blood and subsequent regulations to get us to the point we're not slaving away 16hrs/day in a sweatshop only to die early because some "entrepreneur" sold us poison.
Spooky23 12y ago
Scarcity has little to do with subsidy in most cases. People who run extractive industries end up with a lot of money and are tied to specific geographical areas. Lobbying government for concessions is a high ROI activity, and always has been. On the other side of the coin, government can break these industries too. (And does so routinely) For example, the US/Saudi mutual strategic interest now has the Saudis pumping oil as fast as possible to hurt Russia and other players. If you're a driller in North Dakota or Alberta, you're fucked.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
higherpurpose 12y ago
I don't understand people who use subsidies and free market in the same phrase. If there are subsidies then it's pretty clear the government has gotten involved, no? Instead of worrying about "having to pass a law to ban collecting Helium" or whatever, how about you worry about having the government not give those subsidies in the first place. Wouldn't that be easier?
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I'm not talking about hypothetical perfectly free market, that neither exists nor we'd really want to have it. I'm talking about reality - businesses in bed with politicians. Those subsidies don't get granted themselves, nor they are just whims of government officials. For businesses, it's a tool like any other, to use in competing on the market.
  - dmichulke 12y ago
    "I'm not talking about hypothetical perfectly free market, that neither exists nor we'd really want to have it. " Please do not speak for others. "businesses in bed with politicians" Isn't that a failure of the law system or, more general, "our democracy" itself? Some corrupt company in XY has no ties with you but government has (at least that's the theory). So how come government (i.e., the people there) is still getting paid by your taxes while they are clearly not acting on your behalf? Blaming capitalism is like blaming the guy who slept with your wife instead of blaming your wife (and most probably you should also blame yourself to some extent). "For businesses, it's a tool like any other, to use in competing on the market." Well, for the businesses receiving a subsidy it's clearly a tool while the businesses and people paying for it much less so. To sum up, the subsidies you talk about are neither "capitalistic" nor "democratic" so we shouldn't derive conclusions about capitalism or democracy here. We can very well derive conclusions about the current economic system called "free market" and the current political system called "democracy" but we should agree on the definition first.
Rumford 12y ago
Subsidies originate with government. Prices, when allowed to move freely without state interference, organically induce rationing only when necessary, and inspire the development of alternatives. This is completely natural, rational, and built in to how markets work. No need to pray.
zo1 12y ago
Subsidies are not a construct of a free-market, but of a state. Which can leverage vast sums of money into such a losing game (without any "market" repercussions).
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
If we wanted to, if oil was so precious, we could synthesize it from other substances. This isn't the case like with rare elements. And with most of those, even, we can recycle them indefinitely (we'll never run out of platinum). Helium literally floats away to where we can never get it again.

ptaipale 12y ago

Similar answer: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/27/what-great-helium-shortage/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/27/what-grea...

ilitirit 12y ago

> Oil trades for around $100/barrel. Wavering around $55/barrel at the moment.

Retric 12y ago

While the US dumping its helium supply was utterly stupid and distorts the market terribly. 41 billion cubic meters / 7 billion people = less than six cubic meters per person on the planet, and when it's gone it's gone. That does not sound so hot.

rquantz 12y ago
Yes. People who respond to shortages of non renewable resources by saying, "I'm not concerned. Actual peak oil is 40 years further down the road than these people think it is" don't seem to grasp that that is not actually a lot of time.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  This also doesn't take into account that we price helium for birthday balloons at the same price as helium for MRI machines.
  - ganeumann 12y ago
    I advocate switching to hydrogen for birthday balloons. "Blow out the candles! Blow them out, quick!"
ghshephard 12y ago
Completely agree that dumping the helium supply was short sighted - better approach would have been to auction it off in 5 billion cubic meters/lot, perhaps every 5 years, and let the market set a price.

sliverstorm 12y ago

At the end of the day we have to count on the market, but I still hate that the helium reserve has depressed the price so much that we are just throwing away the helium in natural gas wells.

codingdave 12y ago

Your arguments could be nitpicked, but lets skip that and just take as a given that you are 100% correct. That doesn't change the fact that helium is a non-renewable resource. Conservation makes sense. Maybe it won't matter to us today, or even in 40 years. But it will matter to someone else in 140 years. In my mind, any decisions made based on markets are a short-term strategy. If a resource is non-renewable, I prioritize conservation. Where practical, I use renewable resources.

dbbolton 12y ago
Let's just hope we've perfected hydrogen fusion by that time. Then we'll have as much energy and helium as we want!
- DanOWar 12y ago
  Do you mean fission?
  - yincrash 12y ago
    You're going to split hydrogen atoms? Into what exactly?
    - jotux 12y ago
      We'll split H into three parts: |,-, and |.
- DennisP 12y ago
  True of energy, but not of helium. Fusion produces a lot of energy from very little fuel. Running the world on fusion would supply a tiny fraction of our helium demand.
  - dbbolton 12y ago
    I was being sarcastic.