We Discovered Helium 150 Years Ago. Are We Running Out?
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
Helium 5.24
Neon 18.18
Krypton 1.14
Argon 9340
Xenon 0.087
http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/Fundamentals/AtmosphereComp...
Krypton is rarer in the atmosphere than helium (by molar/volume concentration), though more abundant by mass. Krypton is commercially produced by atmospheric separation. I would therefore expect helium sourced by air separation to cost roughly 1/4-1/5 the cost of krypton production, per liter, or 4-5 times as much per gram. A quick search on Google shows krypton at 65 cents per liter in the early 2000s (according to an article about windowpane gas filling). An Alibaba search indicates that 10-15 cents per liter may be more typical now.
If those krypton prices are accurate, and I haven't made any major mistakes with my helium ballparking, I would expect that applications like helium filled hard drives would see only a tiny cost increase should they be forced to use helium separated from the atmosphere. I think that most cryogenic cooling applications would have to move to closed-cycle reuse of helium. I don't know about welding and leak testing.
EDIT: "The Energy-Related Applications of Helium", 1980 report from Los Alamos National Laboratory, specifically considers helium production from atmospheric separation and from lean natural gas streams in section X.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5141581
A.W. Francis has discussed the recovery of helium from the atmosphere by conventional methods. He predicts that, for helium produced from the atmosphere as a by-product from air separation plants, the cost would lie in the range of $200 to $300 per Mcf in 1973 dollars (over ten times present cost).
...
To go further and separate helium by similar techniques but with helium as the primary product would raise the cost by more than another order of magnitude to about $7000 Mcf in 1980 dollars.
Apparently one Mcf is 28,317 liters in SI units. That's 24.7 cents per liter of helium from the atmosphere in 1980 dollars, or 80 cents per liter in CPI-adjusted 2018 dollars.
That's why, for example, Saturn's atmosphere is 25% helium and 75% hydrogen, but Saturn's moon Titan is basically all nitrogen-methane.
Which is also the real answer about helium. Hydrogen we have in near-infinite supply by breaking chemical bonds (e.g. in water). Helium doesn't react with anything, so so the small amount trapped in oil and natural gas deposits from Earth's radioactivity over billions of years is all we have. After that... we'd better start investing in outer solar system mining operations, skimming the atmospheres of gas giants.
I, for one, look forward to a future working the gas mines.
Krypton has a boiling point of 120 Kelvin, far higher than even Oxygen (90 K) or Nitrogen (77 K), making it trivial to extract Krypton at low cost from the atmosphere in any air liquefaction facility also set up to separate Oxygen and Nitrogen (which is basically all of them). Helium, however, boils at 4 Kelvin. It is not merely cryogenic, it is super cryogenic, and it can only be separated from air via liquefaction at extremely low temperatures.
Instead, the method that is actually used to produce almost all Helium is to use natural gas (which contains as much as 7% Helium) and then separate out all of the stuff that isn't Helium (starting with the hydrocarbons, of course). This makes it possible to produce 99.995% pure "grade-A" Helium fairly cost effectively. Every cubic meter of natural gas processed could yield up to 70 liters of grade-A Helium. Compare that to processing air, where every cubic meter of air processed would yield just 5 milliliters of low grade Helium. And Helium isn't valuable enough to simply run those plants and throw away the other gases produced.
By some estimates, if all of the Neon production facilities were modified to produce Helium as well then we might be able to meet 1/1000th of the world's Helium demand, so this is not a near-term solution to the problem, even if it might be able to produce the gas inexpensively.
Let's also note that even ignoring the specific details of the process, what you're proposing is to use a pipeline which produces helium as a side effect of its intended use of producing methane, and which is usually run on a mixture of gases that is 1% or more helium, and apply it to a mixture of gases which will produce no methane and is 0.0005% helium. The helium is nearly worthless and there's barely any to harvest in the first place; there is no possible way for this to be economical.
About 8 million tons of liquid nitrogen is produced per year, growing 5% every year [1], largely from Cryogenic distillation. By mass, the ratio of Nitrogen and Helium in air is about 1e6 [2]. So that means, about 8 tons would be produced, which is 3.5 orders of magnitude away from the current size of the market (like 30 thousand tons). But it may be possible to use non-cryogenic processes [3] to increase the ratio of Helium in the air before separating out the nitrogen. So between the increase of the nitrogen market, the decrease in demand if Helium gets more expensive when traditional sources run out, and better processes, this means that Helium will likely continue to be available for very valuable use cases almost indefinitely.
[1] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/liquid-n...
The tricky but is the liquidation process only liquifies some small fraction of the gas. The rest remains as a gas, so you now have "helium enriched" air, but it is still a very small percentage helium.
To ramp up production you'd have to build a new plant, and pay for it only through the sale of minor noble gases, the cross-subsidy from nitrogen and oxygen suddenly disappeared. Markets involving joint products are funny things.
Helium, however, has the very low boiling point of -267 °C. Commercial, high-scale production of oxygen doesn't even approach this temperature, so helium will never be distilled and instead be vented as a gas along with a residual air stream.
The point is that the price of krypton is actually the marginal cost of producing it from an existing process, while the price of helium will approach the cost of energy required to extract it, which can be calculated and is quite high.
How is the boiling point of any of these elements determined? I cant imagine that we got some helium in its gaseous form and cooled it down below -267 degrees and then heated it up slowly to find out. Is there something about it's atomic makeup that allows that number to just be calculated? Thanks.
Why not? That's relatively easy to do in any moderately equipped physics lab.
Yes, of course, but sadly we don't know how to do that.
Increasing the pressure on a gas increases it's boiling point. If you have a lot of pure helium gas and a really good compressor you can increase the pressure until the boiling point is high enough to exceed the temperature of the gas, so now you have a liquid helium at an insane pressure.
Next, drop the pressure and stick a thermometer into the liquid. When you hit atmospheric pressure the liquid will be boiling, but boiling liquids don't exceed their boiling point/temperature so helium is going to be waaay cold.
You can see this yourself: take a can of dust off or butane, turn it upside down and spray a bit into a shot glass (do not drink or breathe, super toxic). Instead of an aerosol spray a liquid will come out and begin to boil in the process making the glass super cold...
So, what's happening here you may wonder? It's chemistry/physics in action. When a pot of water boils on your stove it takes the heat energy from the burner and uses it to change states from liquid to gas. If you pour liquid water onto a piece of hot metal it turns into steam (boiling) while cooling off the metal (removing heat).
So when you take any liquid and rapidly raise it above it's boiling point (due to pressure or temperature changes) it will lower the temperature around it in order to obtain the energy it needs to change states.
All that being said, compressed helium is the most abundant means of cooling for low-temperature purposes because of these properties.
By boiling compressed helium at room temperature and pressure we can make something that super cold -267 degrees, at least while the helium continues to boil.
The critical temperature of Helium is 9.35 °R -- above that it will not be a liquid at any pressure. So we have to go through successive phases of compression (which heats it up), cooling via another cryogen (liquid nitrogen initially, then liquid hydrogen in subsequent passes), and expansion (at the right conditions, because of the oddities of the Joule-Thompson effect[0] for elements like Helium), in order to cool it enough to produce a liquid.
[0] https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/61517/reason-f...
You can read more and see some pictures here: http://www.dwc.knaw.nl/wp-content/HSSN/2007-10-Van%20Delft-F...
Illustration of the helium liquefier at page 403.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Still a little weird to those of us who studied chemistry when the 'noble gases' were famously reluctant to mingle.
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If you’re using a rebreather properly and have sufficient bailout, they’re pretty reliable these days. You can switch to OC for sanity breaths if you see an issue and use the draeger ball-gag mouthpiece if you’re concerned about O2 hits.
The first case is the common helium, used to fill up baloons and so on. It is mixed with many others gases, it is common, the price is very low, and despite being used to many things, it isn't running out, supplies aren't getting empty.
The second case is the "helium" as a pure gas, composed by helium and nothing else (except for traces of other gases). This is rare, this is expansive, this is hard to get (and it costs a lot to extract pure helium from the atmosphere). This is the helium that we are "running out", despite being able to extract it from sources, as the price might and will increase.
Most retail gas suppliers prefer to sell only pure gasses. If they have to do custom mixing it requires extra processing steps for blending and analysis, plus they're taking on additional liability. So you can probably get heliox if you ask, but you'll pay more for it.
Gas suppliers keep all their helium in one big set of storage tanks. The only real difference between various helium grades they sell is how careful they are about pulling a vacuum on your cylinder before filling it.
> Nope. The stuff you can get from party stores (in the US, anyway) definitely isn't; more than one person that I have heard of has committed suicide with it.
Apparently, ballon helium is now often mixed with air in the US:
Where can a person obtain ‘pure’ helium? http://assisted-dying.org/blog/2015/07/11/where-can-a-person... Unfortunately I missed the warning about the change in helium tanks that will now include oxygen.
Ballon Time FAQ https://www.balloontime.com/contact-us/faqs/ Our helium is rated from 98-99.99 percent pure. However, due to global helium supply issues, we are now mixing helium with air. All tanks will have 80 percent or more helium.
Are you sure? I ask, because latex helium filled balloons slowly lose air as the helium leaks out - but after some time they stop, and stay a fixed size.
But they don't float when they reach that point!
If it were pure helium, wouldn't a: all the helium leak out, and b: still float if for whatever reason the helium did not leak?
Personally I suspect helium balloons have just enough helium to float when full and the rest is regular air.
As it deflates, the relative weight of the balloon vs helium also goes up.
The balloon isn't going to deflate completely; eventually the pressure on the inside and outside will equilibrate. The balloon doesn't return to its original pre-inflated size because, I suspect, of some amount of irreversible deformation of the rubber as it stretches when inflated.
But anyway, balloon helium is quite pure, it's typically "Class 4" or "four nines" so 99.99% pure. At the local gas supply place, balloon grade and the stuff used for welding shielding gas are the same thing. While a lower purity might be fine for balloons, it presumably isn't worth it to them to either dilute it with cheaper gas or maintain separate product lines.
(Edit: I know somebody is going to ask why it kills you. Helium is not toxic, but it suffocates you if you breathe a lot of it without a break for -- you know -- real air.)
But next time you come across such a deflated helium balloon, maybe try inhaling its gasses? If your voice changes, you know there's at least enough helium for that.
I don't know how safe that actually is, but it seems to me to be a common thing without much reporting of ill effects. Still, do your own research before.
I've been doing that regularly for decades w/o apparent ill effect. I've even taken it straight out of the tank. Over-do it, and you can get woozy from oxygen displacement. But I can't imagine how the poster-child for inert gases is otherwise going to hurt you.
Had I been using a heavier gas (lower effusion rate and tendency to pool in the lungs) or not exhaled and inhaled when I started to feel woozy, I very easily could have required resuscitation.
https://www.zoo.org.au/get-involved/act-for-wildlife/balloon...
"a mineral reserve is that amount of some mineral that we have identified the location of, weighed, measured, tested the extraction of and proven (and the proof is the extremely important part here) that we can, with current technology, and at current prices, make a profit by extracting it."
Perhaps a loose analogy would be with TAM/SAM/SOM.
(That's why the markets cannot solve global warming for example, and that's why free market fundamentalists are often unable to believe that global warming is happening.)
However, even a tax doesn't necessarily helps with the conservation of non-renewable resource. Since the tax is typically a percentage of the price, price going to 0 will still incentivize use of the resource despite tax being arbitrarily high. The same goes for cap-and-trade - which is how they actually failed - the emission quotas got very cheap and so everybody bought what they needed for business as usual.
The only way the carbon tax can work in case of carbon is that it becomes high enough that it's no longer efficient to produce energy from carbon sources compared to energy from renewable sources.
So the tax isn't really a punishment that would encourage conservation, it can just encourage substitute of different resource. If there isn't different resource.. you still won't conserve it even if you tax it a lot.
There's always a different resource that you can substitute if you look widely enough at the big picture.
E.g. for party balloons, sure, maybe only helium works, but it's only there as an entertainment option, of which there are many substitutes.
Same for say, helium for scuba diving—sure, there might not be an alternative, but the purpose of most forms of scuba diving may be fulfilled by alternatives (submersibles / robots / snorkeling depending on whether for practical or enjoyment purposes).
A tax would drive people to fulfilling the wider economic and societal need without using a product that requires helium.
> which is how they actually failed
Cap and trade did not 'fail', it succeeded in capping emissions at the number of credits + allowances. If you want to reduce emissions more, then reduce the total quantity.
Price targeting and quantity targeting are just different ways of stating what your goal is.
What is the different resource that can be used for studying low temperature physics?
For a duty tax, sure, but not not an excise tax. Those are often fixed rates. An NFA stamp for the transfer of banned weapons is a fixed rate ($200). Cigarette taxes [0] are also fixed values. Gasoline taxes have a similar fixed value [1].
[0]: https://taxfoundation.org/state-cigarette-tax-rates-2018/
[1]: https://taxfoundation.org/state-gasoline-tax-rates-2017/
This is not true. If you and I believe that the scarcity of a resource will rise tomorrow, we will try to buy it today so that we can sell it for a higher price after it becomes harder to get. All resource speculation (and boy, there is a lot,) is market-incentivised conservation.
Yes they will. And this increase in price will cause people to use less of it, because people don't like wasting money.
Nothing is being made illegal, so there are no black markets.
But I don't! If the resource is not to be used tomorrow, or any other day (that is, being conserved), then why should I believe it will be scarce?
The problem is that you simply cannot assign a finite price on something that you're never going to use.
There is an experiment in our lab (ADMX, an axion search) for which it is already financially more expedient to re-liquify.
In addition, new cooling technology is becoming more prevalent. Closed-cycle pulse-tube cryocoolers are becoming common throughout physics.
This is absolutely false. Even a basic understanding of supply and demand shows that a decrease in supply causes the equilibrium price to increase and the equilibrium quantity to decrease.
And you can't model the situation (of conserving a resource) in supply-demand model.. precisely because markets cannot do it.
The entire point of supply and demand models is for the exact purpose of deciding whether we should use resources now, or use them later (ie conservation), and decide how and who we should spend those resources on.
If you were to ask be to give a definition of economics or supply and demand, a situation exactly like this is what I would use to define those words.
Global warming and other environmental problems have nothing to do with this. The environment is a shared resource so market participants have no incentive to preserve it, on the contrary, they rush to "use" as much of the common resource as possible and maximize present gain, before someone else kills the planet and there are no more money to be made. The solution there is to tax the externalities and transform the public resource into a private cost that must be minimized, thus preserving the resource. Helium is not such a public resource, it's private to those who have it, produce it and store it.
(By the way, if you read the article, it nicely explains how the US Helium reserve works and how it has been dismantled in recent years; so you can in fact store huge amounts of helium, should it ever make economic sense to do so).
The fact that it's difficult (impossible) to store helium long term is an argument against government intervention because it disrupts present consumption for no clear reason and with meager future benefits.
[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/14/america_s_hel...
The current price is not the best estimate of the future rate. It is distorted by people selling below it's true cost (typically, to pay off sunk costs, or to keep the lights on in their business.)
* It's hard to exclude people from whaling, so you can't "stockpile" whales.
* Markets had less global visibility and insight than we have now, so it's clearer what the speculation opportunity would be.
* Important financial instruments used in speculation (standardized forward and option contracts) had only recently been invented, and wouldn't be generalized out from farm commodities until after the collapse of whaling.
We went from having record-breaking harvests of cod to no cod, at all. There was a collective agreement, to prevent over-harvesting of cod - and all the participants in the agreement lobbied the Canadian government to lift its restrictions (Which it did, contrary to the advice of the scientists studying cod.) A few years down the road, the fish was gone, and the fishermen went broke.
The solution is to (1) internalize the externalities and (2) allow individuals to take over the property rights of a resource, i.e. privatize it. This shifts the game-theoretic equilibrium away from resource depletion.
At what price?
If the state owns land with a billion barrels of tar sands oil on it, should they sell it for $1/barrel? $2/barrel? Should it accept the highest bid that the market will put forward?
What if the state sat on the land for 10 years - would it get a better bid then? Maybe it makes sense to wait until the time is right to privatize?
Deciding when, and for how much, to put resource-bearing land onto the market is a highly political, non-market-driven process. You can't just say 'privatize it', and hope that markets will find the optimal outcome. (Optimal for whom?)
Setting the right level of royalties, or, alternatively, privatization for any particular point in time is an incredibly complicated economic question.
That is a great question. There are various types of auction systems that can be used. See [1] for an overview.
> If the state owns land with a billion barrels of tar sands oil on it, should they sell it for $1/barrel? $2/barrel? Should it accept the lowest bid that the market will put forward?
Why would they accept the lowest bid? Typically in an auction one accepts the highest bid (except a Vickrey auction, where the price paid is the second-highest bid). This is particularly true in the context of privatization because resources should be allocated to those who value them most and thus have the strongest incentive to use them efficiently [1].
> What if the state sat on the land for 10 years - would it get a better bid then? Maybe it makes sense to wait until the time is right to privatize?
It depends on the government's goals. The underlying assumption of privatization is that markets are better resource managers than central planners (e.g. due to the price mechanism solving the economic calculation problem). If a government wants to maximize efficient allocation of ownership rights, then it should privatize as quickly as possible using one of the aforementioned approaches. If a government just wants to maximize revenue for themselves (see Venezuela), well, then anything goes.
> Deciding when, and for how much, to put resource-bearing land onto the market is a highly political, non-market-driven process.
The issue is indeed highly political. However, it is by definition also market-driven. Unless by "non-market-driven" you meant not exclusively market driven, in which case I would agree.
> You can't just say 'privatize it', and hope that markets will find the optimal outcome. (Optimal for whom?)
Optimal for society at large, through efficient allocation of ownership rights. We do not have to rely on "hope" since there is a lot of empirical and theoretical evidence that markets are better resource-managers than governments.
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-60825-...
I meant to say highest bid.
What if the highest bid that you receive today is not as high as what you would receive in 10 years? The government owning land, is by proxy, the public owning land. As a member of the public, and as such, a minority shareholder in that land, I want to either see the proceeds from its use be distributed to me, or, if it will be sold, to be sold at a good price [1]. If a buyer willing to pay such a price is not found today, then I'd rather sit on that land for a decade, then see it go for pennies on the dollar. As a shareholder, I don't give two rats asses about giving up my stake so that someone else could optimize overall economic productivity today. I want to optimize the overall gains for myself, overall.
> Optimal for society at large, through efficient allocation of ownership rights. I don't understand your use of the term "hope", since there is a lot of empirical and theoretical evidence that markets are better resource-managers than governments.
At its extreme, the most efficient allocation of ownership rights would lead to the government selling off all the oxygen in the country, and you having to pay some rentier, just so that you could breathe. Optimizing for situations like this is a fringe, highly ideological position.
[1] Markets aren't always liquid, there are, at any point in time, few buyers for billions of dollars worth of land, the few bids may not be competitive, you may not get your money's worth if you start a resource firesale tomorrow.
Theoretically, one could wait 10 years to maybe get a higher payout (if such a thing weren’t already reflected in the current market price). However, I can’t think of a real-world example where doing so would offset the opportunity cost of lost efficiency during the intervening years.
> At its extreme, the most efficient allocation of ownership rights would lead to the government selling off all the oxygen in the country, and you having to pay some rentier, just so that you could breathe. Optimizing for situations like this is a fringe, highly ideological position.
You find this bizarre because oxygen (at atmospheric concentrations) is not (currently) a scarce resource on Earth, so it makes no sense to assign property rights over it. In situations where oxygen becomes a scarce resource, like space stations or planetary colonies, you can bet there will be a market for oxygen. That is, unless technology makes it feasible to produce in such abundance that the price goes to zero.
There’s already a market for pure oxygen needed for industrial uses, so there’s nothing verboten about oxygen being priced. In that sense, it’s just a resource like any other.
What if it is lower?
And if the government has some special knowledge as to what oil prices will be in the future, it should instead buy a bunch of oil and openly trade on the market.
I simply do not believe that the government has this special knowledge or is significantly better than the market.
If you want to reduce risk, you could instead sell the land over time. IE, sell x% of the land every year, over the next 10 years.
The risk that prices will go down is just as a big of a problem as the risk that prices will go up. I see no reason why one should choose status quo bias in favor of keeping unused land that might go up or might go down.
The reserve itself was filled from a series of government subsidized natural gas plants, so, it's possible to create a new giant bubble under some unused chunk of the southwest if it was required.
Even today, when helium prices are high, the cost of helium is not prohibitive for consumer balloons.
[1] Source: Was alive and attended birthday parties.
https://geology.com/articles/helium/uses-of-helium.gif
It is lumped into the "other" category on this chart.
One of the problems is that our helium supply comes as a byproduct of the oil and gas industry so as we switch to renewable energy sources the yearly supply will diminish even as demand increases.
So party balloons may become unaffordable but that won't affect the total demand very much. Or maybe we'll have far more exciting party balloons filled with hydrogen gas instead.
Far more exciting, of course, because the balloons will explode. My kind of party!
Unlikely. It is not a byproduct of the oil industry. It is very specifically a byproduct of the gas industry. NG is the least carbon intensive fossil fuel so it's likely to lag. Further, you can separate and reinject.
Party balloons are a 100% loss though, so even if they're only a lesser fraction of that 13% "Other" category (7%? 4%?) every bit that goes there ends up vented so I could see that adding up over time vs others.
Ideally proper pricing would help take care of this but that's pretty hard for something like helium.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/28/huge-helium-...
There is almost always another way to get the raw materials, it just doesn't currently make sense to look for them because there are existing sources that are already available and meeting demand.
Fission (as one would find in a nuclear power reactor) does not appear to generate helium. Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 appear to be the major products, the former eventually turning into Barium-137 (no alpha decay), and the latter eventually to Zirconium-90 (no alpha decay).
It works on a geological scale, but not in industrial scales < the decay rate is too low.
Maybe someday the media can honestly reflect reality in this case with a headline that talks about being less wasteful of a valuable resource so that it doesn’t become painfully expensive, rather than framing in terms of actual scarcity on Earth. It’s also one of those areas where the market can probably handle this because few people will be willing to pay big bucks for a single party balloon. Given that balloons are harmful to the environment to begin with, letting that tradition naturally die off seems like a win-win.
Edit: As another poster has pointed out, natural gas subsidies are a problem, which artificially depress the price of Helium. That is still not “running out” though.
How about here on Earth? Since it doesn't chemically bond to other elements, the gas form escapes the atmosphere and is blown away by solar wind, effectively lost forever. All that we have is the byproduct of nuclear fission that is prevented from reaching the atmosphere by stratigraphic trap. It has that reservoir characteristic in common with natural gas, but as we know Carbon is much more reactive and goes through the carbon cycle. We could run out of Helium in any practical sense.
I too tend toward pedantry but I try to stop myself and say "I can be technically correct all the time or I can be sane"
Yeah, but its impossible to harvest He in space (Collect the sun's plasma? Land on Mars, and drill there? A big He collecting sail?)
Not to nitpick, but only a tiny fraction of all helium use is "wasted on party balloons". Most is used for cryo-cooling applications. Heck, we use more helium by far scuba-diving than on party balloons.
running out of the second most common element in the known universe is still "No."