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Helium Crisis Approaching
vrmlguy writes "Within nine years the National Helium Reserve will be depleted, according to an article in Science Daily. It quotes Dr. Lee Sobotka, of Washington University in St. Louis: 'Helium is non-renewable and irreplaceable. Its properties are unique and unlike hydrocarbon fuels (natural gas or oil), there are no biosynthetic ways to make an alternative to helium. All should make better efforts to recycle it.' (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a local article with quotes from Dr. Sobotka and representatives of the balloon industry.) On Earth, Helium is found mixed with natural gas, but few producers capture it. Extracting it from the atmosphere is not cost-effective. The US created a stockpile, the National Helium Reserve, in 1925 for use by military dirigibles, but stopped stockpiling it in 1995 as a cost-saving measure."
Oh, no!
does this mean all the party balloons will be filled with hydrogen instead?
oh the humanity!
Remember to spell 'crisis' as 'business opportunity'.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Then it does seem a waste to use it on those toy balloons as it's almost a sure thing the helium will be "lost".
:).
Well as it gets scarce the prices will go up. Maybe some people should start hoarding now
Children's parties will never be the same.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Build a refinery.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
Want to replace the helium lost and create cleaner, more abundant energy? Now is a good time to pour some more money into fusion research to try and get over the hump and create sustainable fusion reactions.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Could someone please explain how exactly is there a crisis? I mean, the article states that the only thing that is happening is that the US national helium reserve is being depleted, an artificial stockpile program that stopped stockpiling due to being too expensive. Then it is stated that there are plenty sources of helium but no one bothers to take advantage of them due to the fact that at the moment it simply does not make anyone any money. So, to sum things up, no one bothers to store helium because it isn't cost effective and no one bothers to mine helium because there isn't any money to be made by it.
Doesn't that mean that the offer outweighs the demand by a landslide? Doesn't this mean that there were a lot of people smooching the US national helium reserve for a long time?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
damn. there goes my billionaire sky yacht. damn those pesky kids and their party tricks.... damn them.
It's not the End of the World, but you can see it from here, and if we're not careful Things Could Go Poorly. The problem is the smartest people around think "technology" will fix the "resource" problem. Given unlimited energy and resources, perhaps this is true, but we don't live in a world where there are unlimited resources. So, if we're at the top of the heap - look around you: this is as good as it gets.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
... not only of a looming Helium shortage - just google for "Aluminum Shortage" and take a look at the results... many resources on earth are becoming more and more scarce while everybody seems to only concentrate on energy resources.
That, my friends is one of the best reasons for putting money into space exploration rather than wars for oil. We're still far from being able to actually mine anything that's not already on our planet, but we're not so far from a shortage in the critical resources that would make extraterrestrial retrieval of resources possible in the first place.
With Helium it's actually a matter of re-using what we have - gas recycling hasn't been much of an issue in the past, but people need to hear about it. And please don't throw 'statistical evidence' at me that suggests 'there is no crisis'. Even the potential crisis is enough to be worried about it, if the implications are that dramatic. Much of our economical and scientific growth currently depends on the reckless abuse of non-renewable (or non-renewed) resources. We don't want to break Moore's Law, do we?
I'm an infovore...
I commented about this the other day, and I was surprised at the comments that indicated that so many ppl did not realize that we are headed for issues on this. I only hope that we start recapturing it again. Since Natural gas prices have gone up, we have quit separating it. Combine that with Clinton having opened up the store, and we are losing our massive stockpile. Instead countries like Russia and China do it. IOW, the west is about to be dependent on countries on other countries.
BTW, folks, helium is looked at for a number of important uses esp nuclear power, medical, and welding.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I don't think our society remembers being in a time of shortage - and I think that's a problem. It's easy to consume and throw away things if you don't think there will be a problem in getting more, and that attitude is pretty wasteful.
Extracting it from the atmosphere is not cost-effective
Not now, but as the availability goes down and focus turns to finding ways to extract helium more efficiently, along with a sharp price rise, then the incipient profit involved in extraction will likely create a market for atmospheric or some other method of extraction... or perhaps lead to the future ability to synthesise helium.
My question: can any science-types here list some important uses of helium? I'm sure that there are some, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
Subject says it all.
is Helium like the second most common element in the universe?
FTA: helium is a rebel, a loner, and it does not combine with other atoms while hydrogen does
Helium: the James Dean of elements. All by itself in the upper right hand corner of the periodic table.
Which I guess makes hydrogen the Paris Hilton of elements? Alone at the top??
Why oh why couldn't I have been a science journalist...
Companies are already looking at scavenging raw materials out of recycled industrial (or even consumer) waste. As we are able to extract less through mining, we may look more at extracting (what may be in the future) semi-precious metals through various forms of recycling. Already a lot of companies are springing up around this concept, and some are even making decent bucks. As availability through mining starts to fall short, I'd expect to see an increase in price followed by availability picking up again to some extent through re-use.
This may be a pretty damn cool use for bio-science too, as I seem to remember articles about modified plants that could be placed about areas such as garbage dumps etc and absorb various metallic minerals from the ground. Maybe one day we'll see people growing trees of copper and aluminum over previous landfills, leeching bits of once-discarded waste metals from the ground.
I wouldn't say that the lack of raw materials shouldn't be a concern, but in the perhaps it will actually force society to view such things as less "disposable" and further the science and industry of re-use in the future.
TFA says few natural gas producers recover the helium from their wells. If the price of helium rises due to scarcity, those producers will recover the helium. Problem solved.
If the price increases enough every natural gas producer will separate helium. This will postpone the problem until we run out of natural gas, possibly 30 to 50 years away. I am sure that when the western world runs out of these resources our previous fair dealings with the Arab world and Eastern Europe will help us negotiate some fair deals.
I was going to mod you up but then I remembered I time when I didn't have mod points and thought better of it.
There is a helluva lot of helium on the Moon. Moon ground is soaked in helium if I may say so. May be this will give another boost to space program? And remember the Chinese are going to build a moon base. Prepare to buy helium from China.
Two important points about helium
1. It's the smallest atom/molecule, since hydrogen is diatomic and H2 is a bit bigger than He. This makes it more difficult to store as it can get through any holes in a container
2. It escapes from the atmosphere. So, once it's out of the container it goes into outer space and is gone forever.
Extracting [Helium] from the atmosphere is not cost-effective. The US [...] stopped stockpiling it in 1995 as a cost-saving measure.
Not cost-effective, eh? Well, in nine years, it will be! When your options are to use hydrogen, or tro to convince your friendly neighbourhood refinery to start capturing helium, then it will darn well be cost-effective to buy my extracted-from-the-sky-and-stockpiled-in-my-bunker helium instead...
"Good news, everyone!"
The balloons that drop at political events aren't filled with helium, smart guy. Otherwise they wouldn't DROP.
Borthday Balloons will get smaller every year. Soon you won't be able to get them at your local grocery store.
I personally blame the Mythbusters. What between the Raft, The several thousand balloons used to lift the kid, and the Lawn chair, they probably reduced our supply by 3 yrs alone.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
I live in Amarillo, TX where the Helium plant used to be. Check to the Amarillo Globe News to find out what happened to it. They closed it for financial reasons, not lack of helium. It sold last year to a developer. Had been closed ~10 yrs or so and had not been updated for decades before then. When they built it, it was the edge of town. Town grew out to it. This is a stupid story. There is no lack of helium only a change in government policy.
This girl I once fu^H^Hdated had this crazy, mad-scientist brother who used to put on a "show" on the 4th of July which involved trash bags filled with acetylene he got from some welding place. I think he used model rocket igniters.
Anyway, he kind of won the Darwin award one dry very dry year when static electricity beat him to the punch. He only singed off the hair on his eyebrows and arms and didn't get serious burns or lose eyesight, but he quit the displays.
I'll let you into a secret. Everything is a deadly poison.
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Is aluminum really in that short of a supply, or is it a smelting shortage?
There was a guy on Science Friday, Jerry Woodall of Purdue, who has a process of generating hydrogen from an aluminum alloy. I heard him on Science Friday on NRP and he never mentioned any kind of worldwide shortage of aluminum, although he was largely pushing the fact that the aluminum alloy used as a catalyst in his process was completely recyclable and reusable for the same process.
I have heard there are supply problems related to aluminum smelting limitations, primarily due to the energy required -- in fact, I seem to recall that Iceland of all places is a leading refiner of aluminum due to the geothermal energy resources; its cheaper to ship the ore to Iceland and refine it and ship it out due to the immense "free" geothermal energy.
I believe there is shitload of helium on the moon.
Helium-3, which is way cooler than our boring ass Earth helium.
Why dont we just take the H-3 from the moon and de cubeify it? subtract the '3'...and were set.
-I only code in BASIC.-
The USGS compiles a large quantity of useful information about mineral production and consumption, including helium:
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/
You can buy helium from the US government at $2.037 per cubic metre, whilst the commercial price is nearer $3 per cubic metre; adjusting that would seem to make some kind of sense, since the US has 600 million cubic metres of the stuff in Amarillo.
There are plants at Skikda in Algeria and somewhere in Qatar which aim to extract 25 million cubic metres from natural gas a year, but there have been some issues in getting them to work; both Algeria and Qatar's natural gas reserves contain about as much helium as the US total reserves do.
It is impossible to substitute for helium for cryogenics; nothing else stays liquid at that low a temperature, and the ultra-refrigerators that get to liquid helium temperatures use helium as working fluid.
I did my PhD at Nottingham University, which uses a fair amount of liquid helium; the arrangement there is that it's delivered to the MRI building at the top of the hill, and the boil-off passes through a liquifier and is used by the theoretical physicists at the bottom of the hill. I don't know what the theoretical physicists do with their boil-off; there are obvious practical problems with running piping from lots of separate labs to a central liquifier, and liquifiers are bulky and vibrating enough that you don't want to have them in the same lab as your delicate semiconductor-physics experiment.
No, they are filled with helium, but after the speeches they've just given up all hope and are too depressed to float anymore.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You go out of your way to present people with a plan how to get rid off politicians and someone comes along with an XXL ego and an S brain and starts shouting "It won't work! It won't work! They only go up!"
Of course they don't drop down. Ceiling drops down.
Sheeesh! Do I have to tell you how to do EVERYTHING?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yes, nuclear fusion produces helium.
The fusion of 1kg of deuterium produces near enough 1kg of helium, and, umm, 2.7MeV per fusion * 6*10^23 atoms per mole * 500 moles of D atoms per kilogram / 2 deuteriums per fusion * 1.6e-19 joules per eV = 64.8 terajoules of energy.
So, a one-gigawatt fusion power plant would produce a kilo of helium every eighteen days; if the current electricity use of France were provided entirely by fusion plants, you'd get thirty tons a year. The large hadron collider uses 120 tons of helium, but efficiently; present planetary helium use is about seventy-five tons a day.
For comparison, the US produces from natural gas about 76 million cubic metres of helium a year; a cubic metre of helium weighs 1000/22.4*4 grams, so 76 million cubic metres weigh about fifteen thousand tons.
If you dig in the ground to get something out, it's mining. Drilling into underground reservoirs is a form of mining. http://www.mininglife.com/Miner/drilling/
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I love the line from the end of the Wikipedia article:
:-)
The resulting "Helium Privatization Act of 1996" (Public Law 104-273) directed the United States Department of the Interior to start liquidating the reserve by 2005.
OK, OK, so they are going to start liquidating the reserve, but the big question is - are they going to sell off the helium to make some cash?
Because helium is the second smallest atom, it permeates most storage containers. Storage is marginally possible in very large volumes such as the national store because of low surface to volume ratios. During the Sealab experiments, a major cost was replacing CRTS. The helium from the helium-oxygen atmosphere seeped into the cathode ray tubes rendering them useless. For the same reason, helium-neon laser tubes can be rejuvenated by immersion in a helium atmosphere. The only known method of creating helium in quantity is nuclear fusion. This helium shortage has been foretold for some time. I personally know of warnings from the 60s. It is one of the primary reasons for lack of commercial interest in modern lighter-than-air flight technologies.
In the name of science, you should see what happens when you ignite those balloons.
:-)
In the name of science? Nah, take em outside and do it just for fun!!
Ever fill a balloon with carbon dioxide then drop it? It gives visual meaning to the phrase 'went over like a lead balloon.'
Now that would be a cool sight. Dropping C02 filled balloons at a political rally. They wouldn't float down. They'd plummet straight to the ground and wouldn't even bounce. It wouldn't look natural.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Mythbusters did a segment on this and found that the thermite coating causing the disaster was nothing more than a myth. Well, at least the part of it being caused solely by the thermite was... From Wikipedia: "Using the same compounds used in the Hindenburg's paint, the MythBusters discovered that they could combine to form highly incendiary thermite. However, the actual proportions of components in the paint burned too slowly to match the film footage of the Hindenburg disaster. A scale model of the Hindenburg using the same paint and placed in a hydrogen-rich environment took about a minute to burn and did look very similar to the original events. In the end, they concluded that the Hindenburg's demise could be attributed to both the hydrogen and the paint, and they agreed that the paint by itself was not responsible for the rapid burning of the airship. They also pointed out that if actual thermite covered the Hindenburg, it would make the airship too heavy to fly." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(season_5)#Episode_70_.E2.80.94_.22Hindenburg_Mystery.2C_Crocodile_Zig_Zags.22
If continuous fusion is achieved, the process will include some mean of extracting mass from the cavity to maintain a constant hydrogen and helium mass. I see no reason why diverting the "exhaust" to a liquefaction plant to recover helium should be a problem.
The problem with this approach is that a nuclear fusion power plant would only consume a few grams of hydrogen per day and therefore produce only a few grams of helium daily whereas worldwide helium consumption is several orders of magnitude higher. Even if all power was produced from hydrogen fusion, power plants would only supply a tiny fraction of overall helium demand. A fusion plant's own He production might not even cover the plant's leakage.
Since fusion reactors cycle thousands of liters of He to keep their plasma levitation/containment coils nice and frosty, it would be a shame to end up in a scenario where scavenging enough He to start the reactor became problematic.
Doesn't this sound sort of like part of an old Adam West script?
And on a side-note which is probably more relevant. . .
Since the Hindenburg went up in flames because it had been painted with thermite and not because of the gas it had been filled with, perhaps our airships should be using hydrogen which has more lifting power than helium anyway.
I've always felt slightly gyped by not getting to live in that reality where we had regular airship traffic and where classy chicks all smoked from foot-long cigarette holders. I want to wear a waxed mustache and say things like, "Now see here, what?" and not sound like an idiot like I currently do when I speak that way.
-FL
Extracting it from the atmosphere is not cost-effective at current pricing levels
There, fixed it. Helium is available. We can extract it out of the air for anyone who needs it. However, the price they want to pay may not make it worthwhile to the supplier so we have fewer and fewer suppliers who can provide Helium and still stay in business.
Saying "something is running out" never seems to take price into consideration. Same issue with oil. There is PLENTY of oil on the earth. The question is: how valuable is it to you (the consumer) to extract and use it? I guaran-damn-tee you that if Helium sold for $5000/cu ft -- we'd have PLENTY of helium. And most likely, I'd be in the helium sales business tomorrow. That's how capitalism works. If demand is out of whack with supply, then the price goes up and more suppliers come online to provide that product. If supply is out of whack with demand, then prices go down and fewer and fewer suppliers stay in that business.
I see it something like:
1. Go to Soviet Russia
2. Find some old Koreans
3. ????
4. Profit!!!!!
See how easy it works?
The problem is not with recovering the helium... it is that the amount of fused hydrogen to produce megawatts is so small that fusion reactors with by-product helium recovery equipment (simply liquefy the "exhaust", dumping the "unburnt" hydrogen back in the fuel tank and pumping the He into the cooling system's tank) might not even be helium self-sufficient due to leakage in the cooling/pumping system without building a low pressure double-wall to catch and recycle leaked helium.
A fusion power plant would only produce enough helium to fill a few balloons each day so man-made helium will be a really expensive commodity once natural stocks are exhausted.
Save helium and save money by switching to hydrogen balloons. Just remember to open windows when popping them indoors to avoid detonable accumulation and keep them away from hairy surfaces when lighting them up for safe fun/show or closed-quarters disposal.
we will NEVER run out of oil. NEVER. It will just get more expensive until something else replaces it
Shall I say anything?
Nah.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Hmmm.... There's a joke here about hot air, but I can't quite get it off the ground.....
I strongly suggest you read this criticism of the incendiary paint theory.
The short answer is: we can actually calculate how much static energy each panel could hold, and how long and how powerful the spark between panels would be. There simply wasn't enough energy to ignite the panels. I think the greatest testimony against the "electric spark started it" is that Addison Bain, who popularized the "thermite paint" theory, had to hold a piece of the Hindenburg fabric in an electric plasma-arc generator (Jacob's ladder) to get it to burn, and even then not very well.
Read Appendix B for a full discussion on how much electric energy each panel could hold and discharge.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Economomics is driven by rarity. Helium is the rarest of all the naturally occuring elements and was discovered in the sun's spectra before it was discovered here on earth. Once it is released, it it practically impossible to recover. Sooner or later, someone is going to succeed finding a commericial use for this stuff. I once went to a talk at NASA concerning one motivation for going to the Moon in the 1960's. It was hoped that there would have been enough He 3 (2 protons, 1 neutron) in the moon's atmosphere to make a fusion reaction an economic payoff. If these types of reactions yield enough energy, then it will be well worth it to travel to the moon to harvest He 3. I don't know if fusion reactions for He 4 to yield enough energy to be economically viable.