Will We Run Out of Helium?
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thoughtco.com
We won't run out of helium, it will just become much more expensive, like neon. You can distill helium out of the atmosphere, but it's a few orders of magnitude more expensive than separating from natural gas, which will remain a source for a very long time.
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, wherever it is to be found, we'll find it.
It just won't be very affordable for birthday parties.
I agree that it's unaffordable for birthday parties, but the side effect of littering rubber waste for birds to choke on is arguably a more serious reason to forego party balloons.
What I'm more worried about is a replacement for liquid helium in cooling. CERN depends on cryogenics for keeping superconducting magnets cold. Helium's a lot safer than hydrogen. What other alternatives will there be for supercooling when there's no helium?
I'd be more concerned about running out of affordable helium to use in MRI machines.
That could actually cost lives.
The LHC uses just roughly 100t He (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Design), I don't resplenishing this going to be a problem, even if He becomes more scarce.
Is that really a big concern? What's expected to come out of CERN that will help humanity face the challenges of the next 1000 years? It's an honest question, perhaps I'm missing something.
Nobody in the world thought there was any practical use of the knowledge that time dilated at high speed - the speeds were so ridiculously high that we'd never reach them.
That part was right - nothing we build moves fast enough for time dilation to be relevant at a human level. But none of our navigational systems, to pick a single case, would work without an understanding of it.
I'm aware that there's an off-chance that basic research can become useful for something. Of course people always point to GPS as an example.
You can say that about pretty much any research, however. Since resources are finite, should we not focus on basic research that has the most promise of practical usefulness?
As far as I can tell, particle accelerators are used to prove hypotheses whose truth/falsehood are not practically meaningful to pretty much any human being alive, now or in the future. It's an expensive hobby for physicists, as far as I can see.
Again, I'd love to hear a better argument than the old "basic research is good because GPS".
All electricity, all chemistry, started out as expensive hobbies for rich people. Go back to the Greeks and steam power and automation were seen as expensive hobbies for rich people. None of these things were thought to be practically meaningful to pretty much any human being alive.
There is only a small chance that any given piece of research is useful, to be sure. Basic research is fundamentally about long-shots. But without basic research, you never get to the stage of directed research. You can't work out the best way to increase transistor density if you don't first work out what electricity is. But in the nineteenth century, it would have been wiser to have directed all that research into electricity into practical things like hydraulics. Where would we be now if we'd taken that path?
If you think there's nothing else to be found in physics, sure, we can stop. But plenty of people in the ancient world thought there was nothing left, too. All of those detractors have been wrong right up until the last century. The question is, how sure are you that you're the first generation in two thousand years to be right?
To the contrary, I think there's an infinite amount of things to be found out, across all sciences. However, for all I can tell, CERN is out to prove hypotheses for which no one today can conceive of any use whatsoever.
By contrast, there are many relatively low-hanging fruits in science and engineering that aren't long shots at all.
I'm not gonna say the billion-dollar budget of CERN should be re-appropriated, but it does seem overblown.
In any event, I'm not at all worried about CERN shutting down because helium gets to expensive.
It's not a direct result of CERN, but a byproduct. They have special requirements for cooling, data processing, engineering, etc. It helps to push for improvements in these fields.
After all, there was a plethora of internet services early on, the web just happened to eat most of them.
Perhaps I'm undervaluing the merits of taking a shower to solve a problem unrelated to cleaning my body, metaphorically speaking.
> The reason we will not run out is that hydrogen forms bonds with other atoms besides itself
And hydrogen is the single most common element in the universe (three times the Helium quantity, by mass despite being the lightest, according to [1]). Oxygen is the third one, and is 24 times less common than helium. No wonder our gas giants (and sun) are so big.
Still according to [1],
> Hydrogen and helium are estimated to make up roughly 74% and 24% of all baryonic matter in the universe respectively.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem...
Helium production is a byproduct of natural gas production. If we're not running out of natural gas we're not running out of helium.
There are plenty of reasons to quit extracting natural gas, but that's a separate matter.
Just like imo we’re going to use every drop of oil for plastics, lubricants, composites, military and legacy applications.
Still a pretty open question. Those uses are powerfully subsidized by the fuel applications- aside from military use, all the things you listed add up to <2% of all oil. There is a massive oversupply.
Oil processing involves reforming molecules catalytically into other forms of hydrocarbons. It's not just separation. If fossil prices increased substantially, it would be very difficult to predict if natural hydrocarbon sources would be cheaper. Natural oils are quite cheap but narrowly distributed, unlike crude oil, and form different mixes when reformed by various processes.
The bottom line you should take away is that we absolutely don't need oil. We could replace it totally with natural sources using essentially our current product chain (eg steam cracking facilities) at a very reasonable cost. It's far and away the smallest problem with not using oil. To put that in context, it's a smaller problem than making steel without coal/coke, which is a solved problem. India makes nearly all their steel with natural gas.
I'll also point out that silicones are much better products for most lubricant and plastic/rubber uses. Oil is cheap and usually inferior, except for most engineering plastics.
Oh? What industry are you in and do you have a source for that statement?
Because you see car oil synthetics are preferred over mineral maybe?
Because 20 years in automotive and composites says that’s full fantasy.
Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil. It’s a oil derived plastic that’s burnt and spun and burnt again while being treated with more oil. It’s non-recyclable and pretty damn dirty, I’ve yet to see a carbon that was oil free, but please let me know when you have found one!
Silicone rubbers are well known to have far superior mechanical and chemical properties than carbon-based rubbers. 99.9% of the time the only factor is cost. N-butyl and urethane have some advantages for certain chemicals, which is almost never relevant. Silicone plastics are at least as good as common plastics like PVC, ABS, HDPE etc. Fancier stuff like flouropolymers, definitely not.
> Because you see car oil synthetics are preferred over mineral maybe?
Is this some kind of gotcha you're trying to set up? Synthetic oils are not silicones.
> Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil.
NB that I was specific- lubricants, plastic, and rubber. There is a composite made from silicon... Fiberglass. It's orders of magnitude more common than CFRP and in many applications s-glass is both stronger and lighter. Still bonded with carbon, of course.
Overall you're responding to an argument that I am not making.
Well, off the top of my head, there's diamond and charcoal. Not to mention the carbon that's in all living things.
Context friend.
Carbon as in carbon the topic of carbon fiber. OR - please share your process of taking charcoal and getting carbon FIBER from it, we'll be billionaires!
I don't see why. The US has for quite some time been trying to get rid of its helium reserve. Helium has plenty of interesting uses, but it's not valuable enough to justify mining natural gas just for the helium.
Helium is a by-product of nuclear fusion. Magic indeed!
Fission too. Yet we are not collecting it. It's not clear if the same problems will apply to collecting it from fusion.
I called it a 'by-product' because it's not the product we're actually aiming for, not the point of the exercise - if oxygen were produced instead (by whatever science-ignoring magic) we wouldn't mind.
In fission it's a byproduct in that it's not our main intention.
The answer looks very simple until you remember it is produced inside a container, that may of may not contaminate it.
Apart from reducing CO2 emissions and giving potential for future profits from gas production, the reinjection strategy also maintains higher reservoir pressure thus boosting oil production. The fact that gas is flared at some fields speaks volumes of how crazy the oil industry is.
The Statfjord field is a prime example of a field with reinjection and subsequent gas production.
The other comment about reinjection makes way more sense, though.
It’s not like a safe storage, efficient, fairly clean source of energy is ever going to be worthless.
Edit: citation. It’s called “flaring”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare#Impacts_of_waste_fla...
1. Fusion
2. Fission byproducts
3. Catching the solar wind
4. Mining the atmospheres of gas giants
>1. Fusion
I appreciate your optimism but unless you're talking about harvesting the fallout of fission bombs fusion probably won't be a practical source of helium for quite some time.
As for harvesting gas giants imagine the costs involved to send a ship close enough to one of these monsters to harvest a significant amount of helium, then manage to escape the gravity well and make it back to us. That would probably be end up being the most expensive substance on earth.
Of course that’s currently only worth ~6,000$ so it’s not being collected. But, if that’s the only option at 100,000x current prices it might be used.
Hypothetically, if 30% of the world’s electricity was generated by fusion they would be producing ~350,000 kg of helium per year. Still well below current production, but also not an insignificant amount.
A more efficient design would probably be to have a miner full-time there, sending payloads in higher orbit, and a transport ship that approaches on a parabolic orbit, so it only needs engines to accelerate the payload, counteract friction and adjust trajectory
It would still be very expensive, though.
I suppose that the good news is that wherever you're getting your helium from you'll probably also have copious quantities of hydrogen available so you won't have to carry that over. Managing to oxidize it however is left as an exercise to the reader (apparently there's a tiny amount of water in Jupiter, but of course then you'd need some other energy source to electrolize it).
Or you just push it through a pipe, space-elevator style, exactly how many hard science fiction authors do it for mining gas giants for reaction mass/other fuel.
Should be considerably cheaper from an energy standpoint.
If you're to a point where you can create such a station and manage regular transport between two bodies, you're going to be able to build some sort of pipe that should be able to contain the helium enough to pump it far enough out to considerably reduce the cost of leaving orbit.
For a visual representation of this, see https://xkcd.com/681/
So, one could imagine a siphon which would take helium from Uranus to Earth. A normal siphon moves a liquid out of a gravity well by relying on a deeper gravity well. Of course, there a limits to the height that siphons can handle, based upon the vapor pressure of the fluid, and the idea of running a really long tube from one planet to another is kind of ridiculous. However, the same energy differences could be used in principle to power a more realistic scale system, like a recirculating ship which gains kinetic energy on the Uranus-Earth run and loses it on the pick-up-helium-at-Uranus run. Such a system would need to dump angular momentum around the Sun at one of the planets, because this doesn't balance when you move mass from one planet to another.
My inner five-year-old loves the idea of mining gas from Uranus. :)
If you managed to produce ten thousand tons per year (out of a market of about 25,000-30,000 tons per year currently, although perhaps set to grow along with the global economy), the cost could be manageable.
It depends on launch costs and cost per kg of the material. Market price of refined helium is what, around $40-100/kg? Maybe up to $400/kg in the case of supply crunches and in refined liquid form?
And it probably depends on development of nuclear thermal rockets/ramjets to enable you to reach orbital velocity of Uranus in one or two reusable stages. As well as improved thermal protection systems (TPS) to enable reusable TPS at the higher velocities of reentry for Uranus. Currently, with chemical rockets, we can probably get costs down to $10/kg for bulk liquids to LEO (see here: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/making_life_multip... slide 41, do the math and the tanker costs per kg of propellant to LEO is less than $10/kg to LEO).
It's not impossible for nuclear thermal rockets to get prices down low enough. Even assuming fairly low efficiency (say, 1000s Isp with about 20 kg of propellant needing to be expelled for each kg of payload to escape velocity... taking into account dry mass ratio of about 20 due to the exponential rocket equation and Uranus's 21.5km/s escape velocity) and non-breeder reactors (where the fuel cost is about $0.15/MWh), the energy cost of the uranium to push a kilogram of material from the cloud layer of Uranus to escape velocity is still on the order of cents per kg. Of course, it then requires years in transit, so it'd only be feasible if financial/market conditions were exceedingly stable.
So in principle, it's possible to imagine that in 100 years hence, it could be feasible to mine Uranus for helium and meet near-current market prices. But the current ~$2 billion/year market for helium is probably much too small. But when it's a more-lucrative $20 billion/year market? More realistic.
But helium-3 for low(ish) neutron fusion may be a larger market by then, and THAT could be a significant market as well, with less challenge for getting price per kg to orbit reasonable (say, on the order of $10,000/kg or more for energy purposes, and it may be feasible to use expendable rockets for such small amounts of material, thus avoiding the more extreme performance requirements for the TPS and structure). Perhaps helium-4 mining would be an off-shoot of helium-3 mining, then.
But you forgot a few: mining asteroids, catching comets, processing huge amounts of lunar regolith and prospecting for Earth sources. Which are almost possible and economical, compared to the rest. In fact the latter is being done.
none really
If we consume 0.1 lbs of helium for every 1.0 lb of natural gas, but only produce 0.05lbs of helium for every 1.0 lb of natural gas then the helium byproduct from natural gas is not sufficient to meet demand.
"Helium production is a byproduct of natural gas production. If we're not running out of natural gas we're not running out of helium."
It just won't happen soon.
Just so you can plan ahead.
But the history of helium production is fascinating. The US government seems to have severely mismanaged this resource.
https://earthsharing.org/a-comedy-of-errors-how-the-us-gover...
And we had for a long time a clear economic explaition why this happens. Its well understood but somehow the same ideas are repeated all the time.
And your example is horrifingly bad, because if we were talking about humans there would be a mountain of evidence that in fact humans are not important.
However in the whole history of the modern world we have never actually run out of a non-renewable resource. Even when supposedly the smartest people predicted it over and over and over and over again.
At some point this is just idiological bable unsupported by even the slightest amount of evidence and should be treated as such.
It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it" - do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways out of things?
The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could happen.
So if somebody says that something that is now available for essentially free, ie used to fill up balloons and children birthday parties you immediately know that it is nonsense.
With all of these arguments going back 200-300 years the people who make them never take a general higher level trend into account to make their argument.
> It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it" - do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways out of things?
What I'm saying is that we should be intellectually honest and look at the actual trends and data we have historically for such claims and consult our models that we as humanity have developed to understand how these dynamic works.
This is what we do in basically every single situation but somehow when arguing about 'resources running out' we throw this out and are just willing to believe the same old nonsense arguments over and over again.
> The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could happen.
That is a totally different problem. The Ozone was a externalize problem. Focusing on those kind of problems makes actual sense. That's my exact point, instead of inventing nonsense scaremongering problems about Peak-Whatever.
This doesn't make sense to me. If the market price doesn't reflect its value, why wouldn't somebody just buy up all the artificially cheap helium and stockpile it, to sell it at its "true" market value later?
We're still putting Helium in party balloons, after all. Why aren't all the "high value" users of Helium hedging for a time when Helium becomes more scarce? Is this really a market failure, or is there something missing from this narrative?
But yes, this argument explains why the "running out of helium" narrative is overblown.
The whole paragraph doesn't make sense to me.
The article doesn't answer the question asked in the title. I am not really sure about the message of the article, perhaps it was about the US helium reserve being decommissioned but not actually ?
> doesn't make sense
Indeed. Unless there are externalities, a free market by definition brings a price into line with the current value of a good.
I should admit that the concept of externality is subtle, and I don't know that I've ever seen a precise definition. A taxi driver should not consider the existence of a competing driver an externality, for instance, but a definition that avoids such implications is not obvious.
(figures it’s dun floating overhead all the time)
If all power generated right now was from D+T fusion, it would generate about 8.2% of the current helium consumption. We consume 153,596 TWh of thermal energy per year [1]. Each D+T reaction releases 17.59 MeV [2]. Multiply by the atomic mass of He4 and divide by Avogadro's number to get the mass of He4 produced per energy produced. Divide by the density of He4 at STP to get volume of He4 produced per second [3]. Divide by the consumption of He4 to get the ratio of He4 produced to He4 consumed [4].
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(153596+TWh+%2F+year)+...
1. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-and-changing-en...
2. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/fusion.htm...
3. https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gas-density-d_158.html
4. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11053-017-9359-y
The other most commonly used liquid for crycooling is liquid nitrogen. But Nitrogen freezes at 63 K (-320 F) so you can not get it cold enough for all applications.
Liquid helium is also used in the Aerospace industry for testing or running spacecraft hardware that will be at those extremely cold temperatures. For example the optics of the James Webb Space Telescope need to be that cold in order to measure the weak infrared signals, else the thermal noise from the instrument itself would overwhelm the signal [2]
[1] https://www.lindeus.com/en/industries/medical/_mri/liquid_he... [2] https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html#temps
Now stockpiling an extra 50 tanks as a buffer for a half-tank-a-day habit.
Sadly I did not build the lab I'm at now or we could be getting more done with less than 10 percent of what we use presently, and we're quite a bit better than average already.
Lots of technical debt for helium users consists of old systems which were built when helium was way less expensive and leaked a lot but was not significant dollars compared to other commonly known corporate waste so nobody cared.
It may be surprising to some, but there are many high-tech organizations you would expect to be able to handle their helium as tightly as possible, but that capability is truly not in house nor within reach even from contractors who appear to have the capability because they have actual satisfied customers.
Not everybody can do it the NASA way and that's what you need.
Otherwise continued helium reduction efforts do not reduce expenditures like they do at first, once you get far enough below the overall leak rate.
As to whether the Earth or maybe just gas users will run out or have to give up, Kornbluth probably knows as much as anybody:
For an individual helium atom it's possible to pick up enough velocity to escape Earth's gravity. When they're all tied together in a balloon, that's not going to happen.
Getting to space is easy. Staying there is hard.
For example, if the ISS passed directly overhead of you, it's only 250 miles away. I've driven three times that in a day. The trick of the whole thing is that while it's only 250 miles away vertically, it's moving at 4.7 miles per second laterally. It goes around the Earth (roughly 25,000 miles) in 90 minutes. It's going to be hard to get your balloon to those kinds of speeds.
This "XKCD What If?"[0] explains this concept pretty clearly.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=uranus+...
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751845378/episode-933-find-th...
Humans actually are far better at using up renewable resources, like whales.
How much for a live passenger pigeon?
GP is saying that we run through renewable resources much easier than we do non-renewable.
We might not be able to make enough to continue our current level of helium usage, but that's a completely different problem.
In case you don’t want to bother: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21816395