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Why the World Is Running Out of Helium
jamie writes "The US National Helium Reserve stores a billion cubic meters of helium, half the world supply, in an old natural gasfield. The array of pipes and mines runs 200 miles from Texas to Kansas. In the name of deficit reduction, we're selling it all off for cheap. Physics professor and Nobel laureate Robert Richardson says: 'In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market. The motivation was to sell it all by 2015. The basic problem is that helium is too cheap. The Earth is 4.7 billion years old and it has taken that long to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will dissipate in about 100 years. One generation does not have the right to determine availability forever.' Another view is The Impact of Selling the Federal Helium Reserve, the government study from 10 years ago that suggested the government's price would end up being over market value by 25% — but cautioned that this was based on the assumption that demand would grow slowly, and urged periodic reviews of the state of the industry."
Jesus, Richard, does she really need hundreds of fucking balloons at *every* party? Isn't it enough we got her ponies *and* two clowns, for crying out loud?!?!?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I like how we can talk about peak helium but the second you try to discuss peak oil or peak coal you're a treehugger, an alarmist or trying to destroy the economy. I guess we have to wait until we're certain we're only a century away from using the last of a resource that took the Earth 4.7 billion years to accumulate before it's okay to start to talk about appropriate measures ...
My work here is dung.
All you need is a star with a shitload of hydrogen and a few million years. It's pretty difficult to retrieve, though.
Let's just say that the wasted gas tends to float out of reach....
It is actually light enough it can get high enough to escape into space.
I'd be able to take Mr. Richardson's claims more seriously if his voice wasn't so artificially high ...
Apparently, they forgot that without a large supply of helium operating their favorite cash cow, the manned space flight program, would become a lot harder. There are also many scientific applications that are virtually impossible without helium, with its boiling point at 4.1 Kelvin. Hydrogen, at 14 Kelvin, is not a perfect replacement, and has a tendency to explode. They really ought to be inflating the price, so we learn to conserve helium now while we still have plenty left.
Because no generation should be denied the fun of inhaling helium to speak with a goofy high-pitch voice.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium:
In the Earth's atmosphere, the concentration of helium by volume is only 5.2 parts per million. The concentration is low and fairly constant despite the continuous production of new helium because most helium in the Earth's atmosphere escapes into space by several processes
Until we get those fusion generators up and running! I hear it will be in the next ten years!
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
Doesn't most of it just get released back into the atmosphere? Sure, it's not contained underground or anything, but it's not REALLY "disappearing", exactly.
That's the problem. Helium collects in underground deposits and we drill down and collect it as it escapes. When helium dissipates into the atmosphere it is essentially gone to us.
There's plenty of Helium-4 & Helium-3 on the moon. Now get crackin' ...
Helium doesn't stay in the atmosphere, it is released into space. So yes, it is lost, since it takes hundreds of millions of years to regenerate via radioactive decay underground.
I live in Amarillo Tx, what this article fails to mention is all the helium we still have here, We shut down refining after we had enough stored, we didn't stop because we ran out of helium to refine. Our plant is still here waiting to be used comes the time to gather more. It's good to know people can make up stories about resource and how little we have left to stir up some sort of reaction. Now if oil disappears, worry.....
That would be low-temperature gas liquefaction, of course! What, you want it to be as easy and cheap as finding it buried in the ground? Well, keep dreaming!
Pet peeve wrt the summary, which quotes Richardson as saying that the price was low because a lot of helium became available, which meant that the "price was not determined by the market."
But this is what markets do, they use the power of pricing to set the balance between supply and demand. If you introduce a large additional supply of a resource with low marginal cost to a market, the market's price mechanism will reduce the price of that resource. The market will determine a low price.
The observed behavior wrt the price of Helium is the opposite of "not determined by the market".
There are enough flame wars around about the merits of markets as a means of determining prices, and IMHO they have their limits, but FFS, can we at least have educated professionals know what a market is and what it does? Markets are pitiless, soulless mechanisms for matching up buyers and sellers of resources, and disclosing price information, period full stop. They have no a priori relationship to fairness, justice, accessibility, or legality, and only a tangential relationship to efficiency.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Careful, or I'll get a "[citation needed]" stamp and go all stamp-crazy on your Bible...
Not only that. It was a strategic reserve for something we do not USE, blimps. Yes blimps. It was created so the USAF and Army would have a place to get helium for blimps. What both of those forces quickly realized is blimps are sitting air targets with any sort of SAM.
What most of these guys are seeing is a end to the mega cheap way of getting helium and are thinking it will cost them 25% or more to get. They want the Gov to get back into the field of getting them cheap helium.
Helium still has its place in the national defense. However, does it really need such a large operation to do so at this point in time?
When the strategic reserve was made it made sense to build. Not so much anymore.
It had, and is, creating a crazy depression in the market of what helium is worth with tax payers eating the cost. After 2015 when it is scheduled to run out you will see things like party balloons go way up in price. As that will be the comodities market over reacting. Then it will under bounce then wavy back and forth until we end up with a stable price.
Does having cheap helium today help with things? Yes. Long term however it is not tax payer sustainable. In this case it is not a matter of building infrastructure to help everyone. It is providing a small group a cheap good. They can bear the burden of the cost as they also get all the reward...
In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market.
Uh, what? If the helium was sold and not given away, bled into the atmosphere, or some other odd thing done to it, the price was determined by the market. You may question the wisdom of putting it all on the market at the same time and getting a lower price for it than if you doled it out bit-by-bit, but I think the market did fine in determining the price in a glutted market.
This is the problem when you get experts in one field (in this case physics) talking about things in other fields, like economics - quite often, they are no better informed then any other layman. If the government buys and/or sells something on the open market, it's part of the market, umkayyy? And you don't need to be a Nobel Laureate to understand this. The fact that this was wrapped up in a nasty little bit of anti-government sentiment makes it clear that Richardson was more interested in scoring political points than enlightening the public.
That is all.
Hydrogen and helium are light enough so that they will fairly easily escape from the earth.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Helium is lighter than all the other gasses in our atmosphere. So it floats to the top and is eventually lost. The Earth isn't big enough to gravitationally keep any atmospheric helium, so it all eventually disappears into space.
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
"One generation does not have the right to determine availability for ever.", eh? Helium, eh? Let us all form a circle and talk about how we should all help save the helium for our grandchildren and ignore that we already used up more than half the oil, plutonium and other important energy sources. And copper. And we are killing off a whole range of biological diversity. But let us all ignore that and talk about the helium.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
How often do we need to repeat the same story?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
He means that earth is really 4.54 billion years old not 4.7... 4.6 is our upper limit estimate (oldest meteorites found).
We're steadily losing our atmosphere to space by a process rather like conventional thermal evaporation, and we're losing helium far, far quicker than anything else because of its low mass and subborn refusal to form heavy compounds.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The gas is light enough to escape into space, once released into the atmosphere it is gone forever.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Yeah, I looked back at the summary and realized my statement was not really useful.
Or we can get it via Alpha decay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_decay
that is how most of ours was formed in the oil reserves in the US as a lot of them are encased in layers of extremely low grade radio active uranium.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Funny how helium is one of the most abundant elements in the whole UNIVERSE and we have a shortage!!!
of course, the problem is gravity here is not strong enough for it
how long until
Your basic blimp uses as much fuel in a WEEK of operations as a 747 uses taxiing from the gate to the runway. We need to get people out of these wasteful planes and into a more efficient (and comfortable) form of air transport.
I piss off bigots.
Helium can be formed a couple of other ways. One is fusion of course. The other is radioactive decay. We have lots of that, even very low activity decay going on, it's a matter of bothering to trap the helium from it. Of course if you can find some way to induce alpha decay then you could produce helium (e.g. if you could neutron induce it like with fission or something else). Some alpha emitters have a fairly long decay chain where they will spit out several alpha particles before they stop, so it's not like you're taking thorium, and then getting radium and helium, you'd get potentially 6 heliums and lead (or stop somewhere else on the decay chain).
But overall, yes, the relative lack of helium in future could pose serious problems. Wasting it on party balloons is destroying a potentially very useful product.
The other half of the problem is that it is relatively unreactive. Hydrogen is abundant on Earth only because it bonds with oxygen. The resulting water is heavy enough to hang around. If hydrogen did not form compounds like this then it would be lost from the atmosphere too.
Of course, 100 years is a long time. Helium is formed as a product of hydrogen fusion - that was how most of it formed, in stars, originally. Even without fusion power, we can manufacture helium in tabletop fusors. Even run below break-even energy, they still produce helium as a byproduct, so we're running out but this can be balanced at the cost of energy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
While watching the Macey's Parade last year, they mentioned that the parade balloons (big charlie brown, etc) makes it the single largest helium user in the US (maybe world?) next to the US Government.
Interesting stuff.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Air Force Planning Giant Spy Airship
http://www.military.com/news/article/March-2009/air-force-planning-giant-spy-airship.html
ILC Dover has extended its contract with Lockheed Martin to provide lighter-than-air "aerostats", very similar to a blimp. The aerostats are used in Afghanistan and Iraq to provide surveillance and communication for U.S. troops.
http://whyy.org/cms/news/regional-news/delaware/2010/06/24/delaware-company-builds-unmanned-airships-for-u-s-military/40647
Iraqi conflict brings increased interest in military airships
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3738/is_200307/ai_n9258465/
And in case you were wondering, it's not just the US that's interested in modern airship technology. China has plans for them too.
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4649479
Um, no, more gravity would only make it worse... because everything else (except for hydrogen) would also be heavier too. Meaning that the helium would be expelled even faster. (its exponentially dense) You'd need a microgravity environment with some turbidity to keep it well-mixed (around)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Another reason we need a space elevator - so we can ride to the top and fill our balloons!!
This is not about balloon animals, and it's not your typical media scare story.
I'm a condensed matter physicist. It's very common in my field to use helium to examine the properties of materials at very low temperatures. This is how things like superconductors and quantum computing are often worked on in their early stages. Using helium is important, and because universities don't like concentrated hydrogen (for safety reasons), pretty much required.
The current supply of helium is uncertain. Many research institutes (like the university I work at) have rationed helium. That is, we're allowed to buy a certain amount, and can't get more than that. This is set by the suppliers, who get their helium from the US government. The result is that my experiments compete with the experiments in particle physics, the medical school and other groups for helium. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I can't. From a practical viewpoint, we're not running out of helium in 2015, we're running out now.
There is helium available somewhere else, but there's no economic incentive for anyone to capture it and sell it. As long as stockpiles are sold off at fixed, below-market prices (TFA says helium should be 20 to 50 times more expensive), no one can economically afford to capture and purify the helium which is available. We're wasting the tail end of potential helium production (most in the stockpiles came from oil processing). Think of it this way: when oil runs out, helium runs out. We can replace oil much more cheaply than we can replace helium. Helium is too light an element to be captured by Earth's gravitational field this close to the sun, so that wasted helium is gone.
Helium is the second most abundant element at 25%. Hydrogen is the most abundant at 75%. The rest amount to a rounding error at this time.
Mind you, it's interesting to note that Oxygen and Carbon are the next two most abundant elements in our galaxy, and both are vital for life. Which way the causation runs, I wonder - does the known life in our galaxy use these elements because they are common, or does our galaxy has life because it has the necessary elements?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Just a few tidbits I found since I assume many will follow the same track:
REF: http://www.helium.com/items/19276-the-uses-of-helium
I was then curious as to how quickly we lose helium to space and ran across this:
REF: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_do_gases_such_as_helium_escape_Earth's_atmosphere
I gather from the above that although helium can escape earths atmosphere, it does so very slowly.
In the end, it seems foolish to me to release a known finite resource (finite as to what our technology can easily harvest today) to the hands of whim.
They took citations and stamped "Bible needed".
Most, if not all, of the Helium on Earth is from alpha decay.
Umm.... It leaves the earth. You know is is lighter than air so it goes up and away.
It is not like Oxygen, or Argon, or Neon, or Nitrogen.
It also isn't like Hydrogen which when released is so reactive that a good a precentage will combine with other elements and tend to stick around.
So yes it is pretty much gone.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Most of the Helium found on Earth was produced as a product of alpha decay of radioactive elements, including U238, found almost everywhere. These alpha particles were trapped by local geology for a very long time. We cannot currently produce Helium in any meaningful amount and certainly not at the current cost (e.g., you can get 1 cubic meter of Helium from a party supply store for $25 US).
Yeah, we can permanently destroy water to create electricity. Great plan.
Yes, and it's up there with groping crops for biofuel. Humans are starving and we are feeding our FOOD to the MACHINES!! Great plan! When the machines realize we are competition for their energy, we're all screwed.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Actually no.
It was for the Navy. The Army, Army Air Corp, and later USAF really didn't get into air ships much.
They may have used it for barrage balloons but Hydrogen is just as good since you don't care a whole lot of those burn.
And it was for not just blimps but also Zeppelins.
When created it made all the sense in the world. In the 1920s and 30s how could anybody bomb the US? Only by airship. Well maybe if Mexico or Canada decided to go to war with the US but that was unlikely.
BTW the Navy used it in AEW blimps up till the 1960s I believe and are thinking about bringing back airships as sensor platforms. We are not too concerned about SAMS since SAM sites tend to have a short life time and MANPADs lack the range to hit airships.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yes, and it's up there with groping crops for biofuel.
To be fair, it was an exceptionally well-formed ear of corn.
Once we get fusion reactors perfected, won't there be an abundant supply of helium?
A quick Google search says the current annual consumption of He is 30000 tons (3e10g).
D-T fusion produces about 17MeV per molecule of He output, or 4.24e11 J/g of helium.
World energy consumption is currently around 5e20 J per year. If all power were generated by fusion, that would be 1.17e9 g of helium produced, which is only about 4% of current helium usage.
Efficient fusion reaction like we have now? Like almost as much power out as we put in?
The sun is a runaway fusion reaction. It produces a lot of power and consumes all its fuel as fast as it can, no metering. Please examine its mass.
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pardon my non science background, but is there a way a to manufacture helium?
Sure we just need to capture a bunch of Hynerians and make them nervous.
Personally, as a Christian I'd like to see the line that says the earth isn't ~4.5 billion years old, because I can't find it...
Young Earth Creationism (hence YEC) is a hyper-literalistic reading of the book of Genesis that has been always somewhat rare in Judaism, and not always supported by even those considered mainline Christian fathers.
For YEC to be true, pretty much everything we think we know about physics, astronomy, cosmology, molecular biology and genomics must be wrong.
The good news is that YEC is not the only, or even the best reading of Genesis. See this FAQ for a brief overview, this book for a much more complete overview, and this book if you want a really good, in-depth study of the book of Genesis from a conservative scholar. It's a bit dry, and doesn't give you conclusions as much as really dig into the text, but it's highly recommended if you're serious about approaching the issue rigorously.
I've read many books on the topic, and in my opinion these are the best of the lot. Especially Beyond The Firmament, which is fairly easy read and the best introduction to the issues I've seen.
Perhaps obviously, these books are geared more towards Christians and showing them how to deal with what we believe is an important book, and not towards convincing others that Christianity and the Bible are true. Except perhaps that they might show that not all Christians are (complete) loonies...
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/cargolifter/
"The CargoLifter CL 160 is a semi-rigid airship under development by CargoLifter AG, a German company that plans to build airships capable of carrying enormous loads for the bulk air freight market. In May 2002, the CL 160 development was halted due to financial problems and the status of the programme is uncertain. In June 2002, the company made an application for insolvency. In August 2002, work on Cargolifter's other major programme, the CL 75 lifting balloon was also halted."
whereas these 747's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747-400 see to hit bout 124 tons
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I've got some bad news for you. Helium leaks through solid metal, in 30 years your tank will be empty.
That's natural selection weeding out the wildlife not smart enough to avoid balloons.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Why not?
We deal with large amounts of chemical energy every day.
While putting turbines like that over a city would be dumb even with Helium I don't see a big problem with using Hydrogen for this.
Don't let the Hindenberg syndrome scare you. That crash wasn't any worse than hundreds of aircraft crashes that have happened since. It just happen to be filmed.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Assume we go the p+B -> 3He + 9Mev.
1 mole of p yield 3 moles of He - or 24 * 3 liters of gas at STP.
It also yields 9 * 1.6*10^-13 * 6*10^23 = 9 *10^11 joules = 9*10^11 Watt seconds.
So for 72 liters ( 0.072 m^3) of He, you would need a giga watt for about 15 minutes.
Your table top fusor is now plasma, you just used up more electricity than I will likely use in my life, and you can fill a small balloon.
Do you know what doesn't matter to those problems? Inside-the-home water use doesn't matter. The majority of water use is for power generation. The majority of the remainder is used in agriculture. The majority of the remainder is used for landscaping. Yet the federal government tells me how much water I can use when I flush my toilet or takes a shower? It's the worst sort of nonsense.
If you're on the ocean and have a "water shortage", try using saltwater in your generators (only Cali does, IIRC) before sacrificing basic hygine in pointless "feelgood" measures.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
World energy consumption is 15 terawatts. Assuming my gp calculations are correct, and all energy was produced by fusion, there would be 36 million cubic meters of helium created each year. At that rate it would be 30 years to generate the billion cubic meters that was in the reserve in 1995.
Very true, some of it is politcal. You don't want people in the habit of wasting helium for the fun of it and then thinking it isn't worth anything.
It's much the same with water conservation, whether you use a low flow toilet or a low flow shower isn't actually going to change how much water you waste by much (waste I would consider evaporated and lost to the existing water system, relative the amount typically received from similar sources).
Helium use is broken down here: http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/helium-use.pdf
Which is the latest I found. Even wasting 4 or 5% is still, IMO a lot of waste if there's something it can be used for that's actually you know... useful.
All of this somewhat in contrast to oil and water, in that you can always get water, it's just more expensive. And most of what you do with oil can be done with other things, maybe not as efficiently but it can be done, and you can make oil, albeit in a lossy way. What you need helium for is very hard to replace with anything else (notably cooling), but it's prohibitively hard to actually make more of it (for the moment, and banking on the free market resolving the issue is not my idea of good planning).
What's your point? Hemp's not illegal. I even own a hemp golf shirt - feels great!
Actually, in the US, it is illegal to grow Hemp. The reason being that the DEA can't tell the difference from the air. The clothes you wear made of the material were most likely grown and manufactured in Canada.
Bullish Machine Tzar
Ahh, but that's not a materials scarcity problem, but merely a cost of infrastructure problem. Since we charge money for drinking water, and for sewer, any such problem can be overcome by simply charging the real cost to the end user. That way we all have the freedom to decide between conservation and spending more to get more.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.