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The Increasing Scarcity of Helium
- theophrastus 11y ago"China also plans on mining helium-3, which is currently mostly manufactured, off the moon." add this to the list of why getting our butts into space remains a vital goal (someone is keeping this list, yes?)
- nikanj 11y agoI think this was a central plot element in Iron Sky
- Animats 11y agoRight. He3 fusion is harder to do than DT-DT fusion, which we can't yet make work for power production anyway. DT-DT fusion produces somewhat more radioactive waste products, but less than fission. It's possible, after all, to make He3 by making tritium and waiting 12 years.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI have always found it interesting that helium leaves the planet when it escapes into the atmosphere. Something cool about letting some out of a balloon on the ground and knowing you have just launched something into space, to rise up and then get picked up by the solar wind and sent flying. Romantic notions aside though, it is pretty common in space being the by product of the star's initial gas load. At some point I wonder if collecting it there will be economical.
- kordless 11y agoThe moon is chock full of it. Would be hysterical if we went back to the moon just because kid's balloons.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoNah, one MRI magnet uses more helium than 10,000 kids balloons, and you get to charge $5,000 every time you use it.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoUses or wastes? I.e. is 10k-balloon-equivalent helium released or reused?
- Kliment 11y agoReused unless you do a quench (emergency shutdown)
- jackgavigan 11y agoThis comment led me to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOUJP5dFEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOUJP5dFEg
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoApparently helium balloons use only about 8% of the annual consumption of helium, and that's just about the highest-margin use there is--hospitals effectively pay less for their helium because it's subsidized by kiddie balloons.
- Jweb_Guru 11y agoIt is an entirely fanciful notion that the cost of helium would ever be high enough that going to the moon to retrieve it would be economically viable.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoLong term, perhaps. With the right technology you could skim Helium out of the atmosphere of Jupiter or Saturn. As long as natural gas continues to be extracted, there's likely to be sufficient Helium production from Earthly sources for the foreseeable future. It mostly just requires the right equipment on wells.
- albinoloverats 11y agoSounds like it's time to found the Jupiter Mining Corporation...
- ionised 11y agoDispatch the small rouge one!
- zamalek 11y agoShould be lesser of a problem once we get further along with fusion.
- logicallee 11y agookay, how do you figure? EDIT: I thought you meant there was some wasteful high-energy way to get it from something, the way you can do electrolysis on water (to get oxygen and hydrogen, though this isn't used due to it being easier to just get hydrogen from fossil fuels.) I didn't think you meant we should literally fuse hydrogen to meet our helium needs!
- zamalek 11y agoH + H = He, trivial
- zzalpha 11y agoIIRC, the volume of production wouldn't nearly meet the current market demand.
- zamalek 11y ago"Lesser" is a relative term. My hope is that we replace hydrocarbons quite thoroughly with fusion if/when the tech becomes viable; which probably won't solve the problem but will certainly help. We'll basically have the same situation as we have with plutonium once the terrestrial/natural resources die out - which is bad but not nearly as impossible as simply not having access to the element.
- zzalpha 11y agoI'm not sure what your point is. Even if we replaced all energy generation with fusion. And I mean all of it. As far as I'm aware, the amount of waste helium produced wouldn't meet our needs. Maybe you don't realize just how much industrial helium is used... but it's a lot. According to: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/mcs-2014-heliu.pdf http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/mcs-... As of 2013, some 47 million cubic meters, or 1.8 billion cubic feet, to be exact. Every MRI uses Helium, as do many other systems, for cryogenics. It's also used in applications where an inert environment is required, which includes arc welding applications (think all those aluminum trucks rolling off assembly lines).
- nradov 11y agoAs an active scuba diver I feel sort of guilty about wasting a non-renewable resource by breathing helium through open-circuit equipment on deep dives. And the USA retail price that divers pay for helium has roughly tripled in the past 15 years. Fairly soon I'm afraid we're going to have to either quit diving deeper than 30m, or switch to more complex, expensive, and dangerous closed-circuit rebreathers.
- zzalpha 11y agoSounds like an opportunity to develop simpler, cheaper, more reliable closed-circuit technology, no? Or is there something fundamental about the paradigm that makes that impossible?
- nradov 11y agoClosed-circuit rebreather technology is already about as simple as it can get, but there is a fundamental minimum complexity that will always be higher than open-circuit. You will always need multiple O₂ sensors (for redundancy), probably a CO₂ sensor, control electronics, batteries, solenoids, scrubber, readouts, etc. Those items are usually quite reliable but they still introduce additional failure points and risk of operator error.
- gliese1337 11y agoWhat do you think about the possibility of using hydrogen as a buffer gas (is that the right term? I haven't looked into this stuff in a good long time...). H/O mixtures are only explosive over a fairly narrow range, so it should be perfectly safe to breathe once the total pressure (And thus hydrogen fraction) are high enough, and I know I've seen it proposed in science fiction, but I'd be interested to know what an actual diver thinks about it.
- nradov 11y agoCommercial diving operations have used hydrogen mixes on an experimental basis for extremely deep dives. This was done mainly to reduce the work of breathing, not to save helium. At extreme depths of like 400m even helium gas gets thick and hard to breathe, whereas hydrogen is a little less dense. Nowadays most work at 400m+ is done by ROVs instead of human divers due to cost and safety. For sport diving in the 30 – 120m range using hydrogen mixes would be ridiculously dangerous due to the fire risk. What happens if your tank leaks on the dive boat next to an engine? No sane dive shop owner or boat captain would ever allow it.
- WildUtah 11y agoYou can extract argon from air to do most of what helium is used for. It's completely inert and liquefies at 87K. Pure argon gas costs $5 a kilo. Liquid nitrogen and carbon dioxide will cover most of the rest of the applications and are much cheaper. Neon from air is much more expensive at $300 a kilo. That's because Neon is at a low concentration similar to helium. Helium can be extracted for about the same price as neon, so we're not in danger of ever running out. Helium is a renewable resource that leaks out of the Earth's crust and regenerates from solar wind constantly, contrary to op. It's only extremely cheap helium that will run out, and most of the supplies in the world are still underground in natural gas reserves. There are generations of cheap helium left.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoNo, it's not just that you "can" extract argon from the air, it's that we do, a lot. It's widely industrially available. If Argon were a suitable replacement for Helium it would be used instead due to its vastly lower cost, wider availability, and easier handling. From this we can conclude that Argon is not a suitable replacement for the current uses of Helium. People pay a premium to use Helium today, and that speaks to the fact that Helium has unique properties that are highly advantageous.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- WildUtah 11y agoHe costs $3 per m^3 on the open market. Argon costs about $8 per m^3. N2 is cheaper. There are some uses for He that are harder to replace. Argon will collect in low spaces more than He; N2 might be a compromise for welding. Nothing can be relied on to be quite as cold as liquid He. But there is a lot of substitution that can be done when He prices rise, several generations from now.
- afarrell 11y agoShould this be in price per kilo or price per mole? Argon is denser than helium.
- Animats 11y agoThe price of helium in bulk went way up two years ago. Airship Ventures, Silicon Valley's tourist Zeppelin NT, had to shut down and sell their ship.
- GigabyteCoin 11y agoAccording to wikipedia, they closed up due to lack of a long term sponsor. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Ventures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Ventures
- Animats 11y agoIt's more like the helium shortage made the existing operation unprofitable, and they needed to increase revenue to stay in operation. Also, during the recession, $400 sightseeing trips didn't sell well. Airships leak helium. A lot. You can't just inflate the thing once; it needs constant refilling. I met the CEO once at a steampunk convention, before the shutdown. The price of helium was starting to hurt, but hadn't killed them yet. Their two biggest expenses were labor and helium. Fuel cost was relatively small.
- WalterBright 11y agoI've refused to buy helium party balloons for decades now because of this.
- markdown 11y agoHow old are you, and when did you first hear about the scarcity of helium?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- artmageddon 11y agoI'm not sure what you're implying by asking, but I'm 33 and I remember hearing about this probably about 10 years ago.
- ars 11y agoThey don't fill them with pure helium anymore, just a very small amount and the rest air. They stop floating even when by appearance they are still full.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zaroth 11y agoBut is it real? I have a feeling "Peak Oil" and "Peak Helium" are not too far apart. Both were false projections based on poor understanding of market dynamics, technological advances, and proven and economically reachable reserves. The article itself says the dumping of the last several years effectively destroyed the production infrastructure. As the price stabilizes reinvestment will follow, and doesn't it stand to reason that more reserves will be found and existing outlets more fully tapped such that 100 years reserve becomes 200 years and so on? Sounds also a bit like the outcry over "rare earths" which after China threatened to shut off the spigot all of a sudden a dozen other facilities got in line to happily take their place. The market is lazy, up until the moment there's a buck to be made.
- sliverstorm 11y agoI think a lot of the discussion reads as more like "We have set ourselves up for a very rude awakening" rather than "we are about to run out of helium forever".
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- quadrangle 11y agoI'm completely unconvinced that peak oil is a false idea. We're down to extracting fossil fuels our of sand and rocks, this is crazy. We obviously passed peak in terms of the liquid crude that bubbles out of the ground.
- InclinedPlane 11y agoWhy is it crazy? We extract our iron, copper, gold, and silver from sand and rocks. Is that crazy too?
- anigbrowl 11y agoBecause it's so inefficient relative to just pumping it out of oilfields, that it only makes sense when the price is quite high (hence the huge production pullback in response to recent price drops). Now I don't think we can just move off fossil fuels tomorrow, but we're clearly into an era of diminishing returns.
- anigbrowl 11y agoin 1996 Congress passed the Helium Privatization Act. The Act ordered the Reserve to sell off its stockpile, starting in 2005, at a formula-driven price -- not auctioned off at market rate, and to cease sales and shut down operations by 2015. I'm a bit disappointed that Pricenomics didn't do some follow-up work to determine who sponsored this legislation, who that legislator's main political donors were, and which industrial concerns benefited the most from this implicit subsidy.
- comrade1 11y agoThere's plenty of helium in natural gas, but it isn't being separated because the current price of helium is artificially low because of government manipulation (subsidies probably isn't the right way to describe it)
- arikrak 11y ago> At the current consumption rates, Richardson estimated we would deplete the world’s helium reserves within 100 years. Only 100 years, how scary. I think by then we'll find new ways to get helium, find alternatives or recycle it. A lot happens in 100 years.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoAnd this, basically, is how we get all sorts of environmental/resource collapse. "Bah, I'll be dead before it gets bad, so who cares? I'm sure my grandkids will come up with something, probably. They'll be fine."
- p1mrx 11y agoThere's tons of it right there on the sun. Just vacuum it up, and problem solved.
- juhq 11y agoYeah. Best to do it at night!
- WalterBright 11y agoShould revisit using hydrogen as a lifting gas. Yes, I know, "Hindenburg", but we've learned how to fly safely in airplanes full of fuel.