Helium: South Africa strikes new 'gold'

Also, what happens to an iPhone if you bring it near an ultrasound source with a carefully chosen frequency?

Still, an interesting find, worth looking into.

There's a uniquely British phenomenon where large areas are given in terms of Wales. I think it's probably down to our national inability to decide if we're metric or imperial.

There's a right way and a wrong way to deal with quantities. This is a right way:

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

That's not really a random unit of measurement. It's the only use of helium the audience can be expected to be familiar with.

Also, I can't imagine the seller would be like "hmm, this guy wants to buy gas rights on 87,000 hectares of land for $1. Sounds like a good deal!" without thinking maybe there was something special and investigated for themselves first.

With this news I guess it's not as precious as it was last month...

In the 90s, Congress ordered that the strategic helium reserve sell off most of its helium. That tanked the price, which meant it was affordable for party balloons. It also hurt the business of natural gas producers also producing helium.

But helium can also leak irrecoverably out the atmosphere. We should try to hold on to some of it.

It's so cheap that it's commonly used as a welding cover gas as a way to reduce electricity cost and to squeeze more work out of cheaper, lower power equipment. Recycling in the form of capture of storage boil-off, or even collection/retention of helium that can be safely vented from legacy equipment costs substantially more than just throwing it away forever.

But it's useful in ways that nothing else is. MRI is the biggest example, and the largest consumer of helium. There's a whole niche of magnetics that needs helium until science comes up with better magnetics, if that's possible.

Something that doesn't get a lot of detailed attention is leak detection, because there's nothing else that leaks nearly as well (hydrogen molecules are larger than helium atoms!), not to mention safely, as helium. A leaking vacuum jacket means substantial loss of insulation and increased boil-off. Leaking storage of gases is always dangerous - either it's flammable, or poisonous, or an asphyxiant because it's not oxygen, or it is oxygen and everything else is on fire. The process of using helium used for leak detection involves introducing helium into a vessel and looking for helium on the other side. The leak detector itself is a portable mass spectrometer. Leak detection and repair is an extremely rare skill set at any meaningful level of quality, depends on extremely specialized equipment, and it's as expensive as it sounds. If there was a better option, this leak detection niche for helium would be an academic novelty.

Anyway, if this helium source is what it claims to be, it's significant - about 60 years of current production.

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/helium-statistics-and-info...

That can change if it turns out the actual resources are more valuable, easier to extract, or the liabilities can be resolved with significant investment. Sometimes people throw millions at things too, and don’t really break even. We can’t really see their books here, so we don’t know.

I don't know anything about South African law, but in my home (Alaska) these rights are typically put up for public auction, and yes, there is a further "severance tax" levied on any production that may eventually occur. The (relatively low) auction price is just to lock in exclusivity, generally for a limited length of time. One reason that the initial leases are low is that the actual amount of gas or oil on the property is generally unknown until you get out there and start drilling holes, or at least doing some seismic mapping.

If you find oil or gas and wind up producing it, you then have to pay taxes on that, but if there's nothing there, you haven't wasted your money.

Not all states have a severance tax, though.