Researchers Find Game-Changing Helium Reserve In Tanzania (cnn.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via CNN: Helium is an incredibly important element that is used in everything from party balloons to MRI machines -- it's even used for nuclear power. For many years, there have been global shortages of the element. For example, Tokyo Disneyland once had to suspend sales of its helium balloons due to the shortages. The shortages are expected to come to an end now that researchers from Oxford and Durham universities have discovered a "world-class" helium gas field in Tanzania's East African Rift Valley. They estimate that just one part of the reserve in Tanzania could be as large as 54 billion cubic feet (BCf), which is enough to fill more than 1.2 million medical MRI scanners. "To put this discovery into perspective, global consumption of helium is about 8 billion cubic feet (BCf) per year and the United States Federal Helium Reserve, which is the world's largest supplier, has a current reserve of just 24.2 BCf," said University of Oxford's Chris Ballentine, a professor with the Department of Earth Sciences. "Total known reserves in the USA are around 153 BCf. This is a game-changer for the future security of society's helium needs and similar finds in the future may not be far away," Ballentine added.

Comments

Just two words

[MountainLogic]

Mineshaft Gap

Re:Just two words

[Joce640k]

How is an extra 7 years supply a 'game changer'?

To me a 'game changer' would mean we can stop worrying about helium supply, not "it'll still run out in my lifetime".

Re:Just two words

[Rei]

In a single deposit, that's pretty huge.

Regardless, the "running out of helium" thing is a bit of hyperbole. For one, right now we waste most of our helium (in industry, not balloons - balloons and aircraft are only a tiny fraction of the total). We could reduce consumption by an order of magnitude by better recycling. Even concerning aircraft, new fabrics like vectran are significantly less permeable than old ones, and new techniques (hybrid airships, phase-change ballast, etc) help avoid the need for venting.

Helium can't "run out" on Earth because it's part of our atmosphere. Now, chilling it out of the air would be significantly more expensive than recovering from ground reserves - no question there. But from a concentration perspective, neon is about 3,6 times as common as helium, which is in turn about 57 times as common as xenon (by volume). Neon is about $70/kg, xenon about $3500. So it's not linear, but helium would probably slot in at around $150, about an order of magnitude more expensive than it is today. Some back of an envelope calculations show that a party balloon contains around 2 grams of helium, meaning that the helium would cost about $0,30. Hardly world changing, from that perspective at least.

Furthermore, we're not going to be switching to recovering from the atmosphere simply because there will always be more in the ground. We'll move from one deposit to the next, richest to next richest (a downward trend, offset by the upward trend of new finds and the advancement of new technology driving down recovery costs). So long as there's gases in the Earth of any kind, they're going to be more helium-rich than the air. They're also going to be easier to extract the helium from - dilutant gases like CO2, for example, are much easier to freeze out than O2/N2/Ar.

Lastly, the costs of cryogenic refrigeration are only set to go down. Right now, low temperature refrigeration not only has low thermal efficiency, it also has low carnot efficiency. That is, to say, physics says we can be far more efficient than we actually are. But new refrigeration systems, like AMR (magnetic), allow for much higher efficiencies at cryogenic temperatures.

Re:Just two words

[Rei]

It should also be added that we're far from knowing where all of the good helium reserves are - actually it's not gotten nearly as much attention as oil and natural gas, and we're still finding giant deposits of them. We're only just beginning to understand how helium concentrates in certain reserves and not others - a key aspect to locating future deposits.

Re:Just two words

[Rei]

Except that it's the lightest component of our atmosphere, so it naturally diffuses upwards and eventually heads off into space

And it's also part of the uranium and thorium decay series, so it's constantly produced.

Sequestration of atmospheric helium would shift the equilibrium point slightly.

Insignificantly. The atmosphere loses 50 grams of helium per second and gains 50 from the ground (1.6MT/year). The mass of Earth's atmosphere is 5e15 tonnes. Helium is 5ppmv. You don't have to take the time to run the numbers to know that the mass of helium in the atmosphere is tremendous and only slowly cycled through over the course of a few million years. Not to mention that taking it out of the atmosphere, using it for a while, then having it escape back into the atmosphere is a closed loop.

Personally, I'm all for banning helium balloons.

That's akin to banning baking soda volcanoes to cut down on the global consumption of baking soda. You're not addressing the real issue, only a side show. All lifting purposes combined - balloons, airships, aerostats, etc - make up just a fraction of the smallest usage category (other = 13%), which also includes a wide variety of other non-industrial helium uses. Cryogenics is the biggest user (1/3rd of all helium production), followed by purging and controlled atmospheres. Even welding is a bigger user than lifting purposes.

They're one of the most wasteful products on the market.

Helium balloons are a kids toy. Virtually all kids toys are "wasteful products". Why not just ban children?

Oh the horror for mouse land.

[I4ko]

Why the f*ck are we still wasting this gas on such stupid things as party balloons. Why wasn't this completely verboten years ago.

Re:Oh the horror for mouse land.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the f*ck are we still wasting this gas on such stupid things as party balloons. Why wasn't this completely verboten years ago.

Much of the helium used for balloons is recycled (captured from devices using liquid helium) and the gas in party balloons is actually a very small sector of the helium market. What I don't understand is why the United States is dumping helium from its reserve. This is causing prices to be unnaturally low and there is going to be a massive price shock when the reserve is finally empty. What motivation is there for that?

Re:Oh the horror for mouse land.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are we using it on:

Cryogenics (32%)

    Pressurizing and purging (18%)

    Welding (13%)

    Controlled atmospheres (18%)

    Leak detection (4%)

    Breathing mixtures (2%)

Re:Oh the horror for mouse land.

[spire3661]

Contrary to popular belief, the government doesnt get to control every fucking thing.

Re:Oh the horror for mouse land.

[tlhIngan]

Why the f*ck are we still wasting this gas on such stupid things as party balloons. Why wasn't this completely verboten years ago.

Well, technically, the party balloon helium is quite impure, and it often is economically unviable to refine it for scientific usage.

That's the only reason why it's still around - it costs more to make it useful than to use what we have in the reserves that are usable.

Contrary to popular belief, the party balloon folks are just as price sensitive, and a bottle of the good He is much too expensive, so they buy the crappy impure He.

Once supplies dwindle to the point refining party balloon He to lab grade is economically viable, then we won't have He balloons anymore.

Re:Oh the horror for mouse land.

[PopeRatzo]

Why the f*ck are we still wasting this gas on such stupid things as party balloons. Why wasn't this completely verboten years ago.

It's a proven fact that fully 1/3 of all helium production in the world each year goes to making people talk like chipmunks.

Re:Oh the horror for mouse land.

[LunaticTippy]

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but pretty much everything humans do is a total waste. Why are balloons stupider than driving around for no reason, heating/cooling circus size houses, spectator sports, reality TV, political ads, most MRIs, etc. ad nauseum?

Re:Oh the horror for mouse land.

[shutdown -p now]

This just goes to show (along with numerous other examples) that the market forces are notoriously limited in their perspective, and we should not rely on them for long-term planning.

Re:Oh the horror for mouse land.

[Half-pint HAL]

The problem here is that the government *is* controlling this, requiring the sale of helium at below-market prices and forbidding new production even as reserves fall and usage increases for the sake of "privatization".

But hey, I'm sure if we just privatized a little harder it would work out, right?

It's a ridiculous state of affairs. Let's assume that they are correct, and that the state-owned helium reserve does indeed hamper the development of private helium sequestration and storage industry. OK. How are we going to encourage the private helium industry to increase their capacity? I would say that dumping large volumes on gas on the market and undercutting all their commercial competitors is highly unlikely to encourage competition. If they really want to achieve their stated goal, they should increase their price steadily, encouraging other players to ramp up their capacity as customers try to reduce their reliance on the US reserve....

Thank god, we are saved, for 6 years

[frnic]

Seriously, click bait much? Yes, it is a large find, but at 8 BCF/year it is about 6 or 7 years of supply, that is NOT a game changer for humanity, that is a game changer for the people that will make a fortune rationing it out until we run out of helium.

Re:Thank god, we are saved, for 6 years

[CrimsonAvenger]

It's a game-changer for Tanzania, though.

Ot it could be, at least. A significant source of foreign investment capital, which can be (but probably won't be) used to help lift the country into the 21st century (or at least late 20th).

Now, if they have enough sense to build some power plants, highways/railroads/factories with some of that income, they could be in good shape by and by

Re:Thank god, we are saved, for 6 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but you're way off, and the people who you modded up just don't know any better or also have no idea how far off this is.

Let's run some numbers. The power output of the surface of the Earth is about 40 TW, which is a good proxy overestimating how much radioactive decay into helium there is in the whole Earth (some small amount of that power is primordial heat, a pretty significant amount of it is potassium decay and other beta sources, but we're going to be conservative). At roughly 5 MeV per alpha for decay of things like Thorium and Uranium, you can estimate that 40 TW of alpha decays would give ~5e25 alpha particles a second, i.e. ~300 g per second or 10 million kg per year. The world wide production of helium (not counting what is being dumped from the US reserve) is about 30 million kg a year.

In other words, we're digging up helium three times faster from just near the surface as the an overestimate of the production of helium throughout the entire volume of the Earth, and we're using it up currently faster than that.

So no, helium isn't produced anywhere near the rates we use it at currently, even when you include large parts of the Earth that are inaccessible to extraction. Helium production relies on trapped helium that has had millions of years to accumulate in concentrated pockets and hence it can run out enough to cause substantial changes to current use (which is dominated by industrial use, not "luxury" goods like balloons).

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's hot air. I can see how you could be confused, though, as they both make balloons fly.

Re:"Researchers from Oxford and Durham"

[magarity]

Nice rant about the US and UK pillaging the innocent locals. You seem to have missed the most obvious choice: Local Tanzanian officials will vastly enrich themselves and send their families to the US and UK while leaving nothing for the people.

Technique to find it is the game changer

[tomhath]

Up to now helium was found by chance when drilling for something else. This time they worked out a geological model of where to look, and sure enough they found a huge amount the first place they looked based on that model.

That's the "game changer", knowing where to look for helium.

Re:A shortage of the second most common element...

[amicusNYCL]

There are generally other workable replacements to be had for most of He's uses. Just ask Zeppelin about that.

We can't just replace He with Pb, idiot.

Soon to be a non-issue

[Locke2005]

As soon as we get cost-effect fusion energy, we'll have all the helium we could want. Inhale all you want, we'll make more! Long term, I see no real need to stockpile helium.

Re:REMEMBER THE HINDENBURG!

[Deadstick]

He seems to know a great deal more about it than you do. The Germans used hydrogen because the US had a monopoly on helium and wouldn't sell them any, thanks to their using zeppelins in WW1. Verstehen Sie?

I want our government slow and inefficient

[raymorris]

> Nobody ever said Government was smart and foreword thinking about what it does. In fact, most thinking people understand that it's quite the opposite, government is usually stupid, slow, costly and inefficient, a set of traist that gets worse as government gets bigger.

I HOPE my government remains slow and inefficient. Holding public hearings, referendums, etc. is slow and inefficient. Giving the minority opinion a chance to speak their mind is slow and inefficient. It's much more faster and more efficient for a dictator to just declare government policy. Publishing proposed laws before for several days before they are voted on slows things down.

It took from 1993 to 2010, seventeen years, to pass HillaryCare. I like that way much better than the alternative, which can be seen in North Korea, Cuba, and Syria. They don't bother with transparency laws, public bidding on government contracts, etc. That stuff is inefficient.

Re:"Researchers from Oxford and Durham"

[Zontar The Mindless]

You seem to think that exploitation by foreign corporations and corruption of local officials are mutually exclusive. What basis have you for this assumption?