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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

Helium is scarce in much the same way that crude oil is scarce: there are plenty of reserves still in the ground, but we are consuming them orders of magnitude faster than they were produced, and as the reserves dwindle the costs of extraction will rise.

Helium is a chemical element, and aside from nuclear reactions (which are economically infeasible for non-microscopic quantities) we can't produce more of it.

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In fact our helium supply is a by-product of the petroleum industry. As we transition to renewable energy our supply of helium will diminish as well.

Did you mean to imply we are consuming crude oil "orders of magnitude faster than [reserves are] produced"? Because that isn't true - the amount of oil "known reserves" is how much we've bothered to find and figure out to tap thus far, but whenever it seems like we might be running out we just go find and figure out how to produce more such that total known reserves are approximately stable-to-mildly-increasing.

Here's a plot of known oil reserves since 1980: https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=oil&graph=reserve...

Does a similar plot exist for helium? My impression is that helium reserves are low because the world hasn't been trying very hard to increase the amount we capture as a proportion of the amount we could capture.

I consider discovering reserves to be very different from "producing" them.

We can produce more of it by distilling it out of the atmosphere, it is just rather expensive.

This is exclusively how neon is produced (as far as I can find) so it is obviously economically viable at a certain price.

I did a calculation once about nuclear production of helium and found that the heat from the nuclear reactors producing enough helium to match current usage would be on the same order of magnitude as the power received from the sun across the whole planet.

Helium is light enough to escape Earth's atmosphere though. Eventually the atmosphere will run out of it.

It is also constantly being emitted by radioactive elements decaying on Earth, that's how it got in the natural gas deposits in the first place and also the atmosphere. Alpha decay makes helium, or more accurately is helium. An alpha particle is just a helium-4 nucleus.

There is so little helium in the atmosphere that distillation is totally pointless. Almost all the refined helium we get is a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction.

Neon is distilled out of the atmosphere, and it is only about 3x as prevalent.

Over what time period?

Continuous. I compared power (energy/second, watts) not energy.

Take the helium used in a year, calculate the amount of energy produced by nuclear reactions to make that helium. Compare to the solar intensity at earth's orbital distance (W/m^2) multiply by 1 year, multiply by area of circle with earth's diameter.

The result I got was within a factor of 10 between the two.

So is hydrogen, and we produce that in droves.

Now granted perhaps there is no He + ? compound which we can easily split, but the fact it is an element does not imply we can't make more of it. (Pedantry aside; I of course do not mean "from something that isn't helium")

Sure, we can chemically extract hydrogen from compounds that contain it, but since helium compounds don't exist (for all practical purposes) that's not a relevant point.

We do not produce crude oil any more because bacteries are more efficient at digesting dead trees.

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