It’s not quite separate if there are clear signs we may be begin curtailing our natural gas extraction sometime in the future.
Just like imo we’re going to use every drop of oil for plastics, lubricants, composites, military and legacy applications.
1. Fusion
2. Fission byproducts
3. Catching the solar wind
4. Mining the atmospheres of gas giants
none really
>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.
The other comment about reinjection makes way more sense, though.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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."