Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Helium is critical for all sorts of things, not least IC fabrication and cooling MRI magnets.

This was one of the big issues at the start of the Ukraine invasion because they're one of the world's preeminent suppliers.

The big problem is that there's a finite supply - it comes mostly from natural gas wells - and it's running out. Being lighter than air it just goes up and into space. Once we're out, we're out.

View on HN

- "This was one of the big issues at the start of the Ukraine invasion because they're one of the world's preeminent suppliers."

That one was actually neon. It has nothing to do with natural gas; it's a byproduct of the cryogenic distillation of air, which steelmakers do on an industrial scale to get pure oxygen. As you point out, here's not much helium in the Earth's atmosphere; rather, since it (helium-4) is the product of alpha decay of geologic thorium and uranium, it accumulates in the same kind of places as natural gas. Hence: Texas.

There was a large HN thread on the neon thing here,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30457490 (422 comments)

Helium too [1] although definitely also neon.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/business/specialty-chemicals/War-Ukraine...

Your article's talking about helium from Algeria, though?

- "The helium shutdown in Arzew [Algeria] is a result of high natural gas demand in Europe, due in large part to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Helium is found alongside natural gas in conventional wells. Algeria normally compresses natural gas into liquid form at Arzew for global transport by ship. During that process, it’s economical to extract helium because it liquefies at much higher pressures and lower temperatures than natural gas, explains industrial gas consultant Jon Raquet."

- "But now, much of Algeria’s natural gas is being sent to Spain via pipeline, making separation impractical."

My understanding is that Ukraine and Russia both produce a lot of natural gas and hence helium, and that the supply to the west from Russia was cut off due to sanctions and further threatened in Ukraine due to conflict itself.

The shifting mentioned in the article is further knock-on effects of the war and its impact on energy markets - and how those further constrain the global supply chain for He.

This isn't my area of expertise though so please do let me know if I've misunderstood.

- "produce a lot of natural gas and hence helium"

Right about gas, but it doesn't follow that they've invested in infrastructure to cryogenically separate helium from gas fields, the way they did with neon (at steel plants). (That was the colorful thing about the neon crisis: every country in the world has enormous neon resources; the list of countries that can produce industrial amounts on <6 months notice is short).

I looked it up: Ukraine doesn't export any helium (as of 2019 public data), and it has helium production capacity but it's marginal. Algeria is world #3, behind the USA and Qatar.

https://www.deutsche-rohstoffagentur.de/DE/Gemeinsames/Produ... (pages 69 and 71)

Ah, noted. Thanks.

Also, helium tends to escape the atmosphere into space! Air is just a ton of colliding molecules, and something like helium has an atomic mass of ~4, compared to say nitrogen, which has an atomic mass of ~14, and it is in the N2 form, so it has a mass of ~18. So, an N2 molecule is way more massive than a helium atom. As a result, helium at the same temperature as nitrogen has a much higher average velocity and can escape the earth's gravity at a high rate.

> it is in the N2 form, so it has a mass of ~18

I think you mean ~28 (2 times ~14).

Yup, typo!

Interesting. So should we really be wasting large quantities of this precious non-renewable resource to fill balloons at children's birthday parties?

Or consumer-grade old style spinning hard drives.

Old style? What other gases are used?

Regular air I'd say 78%N 21%O + 1% other.

They are saying that the spinning disks with helium are old, which is silly. Flash is fast and convenient but a terrible thing to rely on for data storage.

It's a very common and I think reasonable way to refer to them - for most consumers there are two types of disk to care about, "old = spinning" and "new = flash". Old doesn't mean "and no longer has any use", just that it's the older of the two main options.

It is common, and silly. Also the terms are not neutral and there is no reason to apply those terms in this case other than to indicate the imagined relative worth. IE, helium is not used in old disks, it is used in spinning disks.

My understanding of this is that there's different qualities and mixtures of helium. When you buy helium from a party store it's a kind of "dirty" helium which is not pure enough for scientific/industrial applications.

The regular helium grade purchased from industrial gas suppliers and typically used for filling party balloons is >99% pure. There are higher grades available for specialized purposes, but using lower grades doesn't save any helium.

https://zephyrsolutions.com/what-are-the-different-grades-of...

Nope! The problem is that Congress chose to liquidate the reserve’s holdings below market cost a few decades ago.

Nope! The problem is that Congress chose to liquidate the reserve’s holdings below market cost a decade ago.

Since we elect idiots, we get idiotic laws and actions. And then our children get the problems we deserve.

"The government is inefficient and can't do anything right and if you elect me I can prove it!"

It's auction, what do you mean "below market cost"?

Yes exactly

And why the price to filly party baloons has gone up 10x over the last 10-20 years..

> Once we're out, we're out.

Not exactly. Helium is a part of radioactive decay and as such continuously produced, so in a pinch we might use filters in the air from nuclear plants or large deposits of radioactive minerals as an alternative source. The question is just how much can be produced that way.

> The question is just how much can be produced that way.

Not nearly enough

Many, many, many orders of magnitude less than we need. This is the worst kind of "technically correct" which is so misleading as to be disingenuous.

To keep up with demand, you'd need so much nuclear energy that the thermal byproduct would boil the oceans within a year or two.

I think it's safe to say that's not a desirable outcome. Once we're out, we're out.

According to [1], in a given year, 5000 tons (I'll assume metric ton which is more generous) of helium is produced by alpha decay of radioactive ores in the Earth's crust. At 0.1785 kg/m³ for Helium, this is 0.89 million m³ of helium produced by natural alpha decay each year.

According to [2], in a given year, 160 million m³ of helium is extracted across the planet. This rate of extraction is 180x the replenishment rate.

According to [2], there are at least 12061 million m³ of helium reserves known to exist and have been measured/estimated.

The timeframes for depleting this precious resource are incredibly short. The known 12061 million m³ of helium reserves, making the very generous assumption it can all be economically extracted, will be depleted by 2096.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41247-020-00072-5

[2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-helium.pdf

Thanks for doing the math. I had not thought that the situation was that bad...

Natural gas is running out?

I think "it" meant helium? But regardless we may reduce our natural gas extraction significantly in the future.

Even if there's plenty left in the ground.

So I'd imagine that reduction of extraction would also reduce access to helium.

The United States produces more natural gas than any other fuel and its consumption of gas is second only to petroleum.

It’s the main fuel used to power electrical plants in the US (all those Teslas generally run on LNG).

It’s also a fuel that doesn’t have a single source supplier. It’s Quatar, Russia, etc.

All these folks talking about reducing gas use and ending global warning by reducing consumption are not looking at this objectively and geopolitically. They see it through the lens of contemporary American environmental politics.

Up until 5-10 years ago natural gas was seen as the major reduction factor in the drop in coal usage and generally a win for the environment compared to continuing to use coal. It was the “better” fuel for the transition.

Obviously we are going to move towards more renewable fuels in future because coming into balance with nature is necessary. But it’s unlikely it’s going anywhere anytime soon and behind closed doors, I think energy policy clearly points to gas as the “lesser of evils” energy source for the foreseeable near future.

Don’t downvote me you cowards. Prove me wrong.

Cauda.

Until we start fusing hydrogen for energy.

I haven't done the napkin math for this, but I don't think we'll need enough power from fusion to generate useful quantities of helium. I think we might get closer with certain kinds of fission. (alpha radiation is helium, after it captures a few electrons. IIRC, where Earth's helium comes from)

> and it's running out

In a "it is literally possible to extract all of it and it will escape to space" sense, yes. But in a practical "humans are anywhere remotely close to exhausting helium deposits on Earth" sense, no. The "we are running out helium" thing was never real.

Fusion is very unlikely to become a viable energy source in the near-term, but it is something we can use to make helium if we are desperate enough.

I asked about this once and someone pointed out the obvious E=mc^2 issue: a fusion reactor will generate only a trivial amount of helium in the process of releasing a large amount of energy.

im in my post-energy-scarcity future, blasting plasma into space as fast as i can to squeeze out a party balloon

So if fusion allows to generate preposterous amounts of cheap energy, what will be easier: generating commercial helium as a by-product, or using all that energy to go and bring helium home from Jupiter?

Currently we need helium to cool the superconducting magnets used to generate fusion reactions so the cart there is before the horse kind of problem, until someone comes up with a better solution.

What's it's use in IC fab?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com