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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.
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.
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.
That's hot air. I can see how you could be confused, though, as they both make balloons fly.
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.
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.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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?
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.
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?