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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Average concentration of helium in natural gas is 0.05%, anywhere from 0.01% to 7%. U.S. proven reserves of natural gas contain over 10 billion cubic meters of helium even when simple extraction methods (that capture about 1/3 of it), are used. Problem is exaggerated.

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I'd like to think we won't have any use for natural gas in the not-too-distant future.

Hank Green just posted a video about this recently, and he addresses this. In the past, helium was extracted alongside natural gas, but there is no reason the two need to be linked. As natural gas prices go down and helium prices go up, it makes sense to drill helium pockets only for the helium, and there are a few operations to do exactly this underway.

I'd guess that by the time we are not extracting natural gas it will be economical to source Helium from Jupiter's atmosphere.

It's an important feedstock for producing a wide variety of chemicals, and will likely continue being so.

Why would you think that’s likely?

Boggles my mind how ignorant some people are when it comes to oil and gas. The modern world is not possible without them. No solar panels, no electric cars, no cellphones for everyone and their mom and no food for 10Bn people.

It is entirely possible and we are dead close to the deployment speed of renewables that will get us there with the natural rate of retirement of industrial equipment. Will be there by 2030 latest. People who claim otherwise did not observe the insane rate of production increases of all kinds of renewables-related tech.

But, natural gas will be still produced as an industrial feedstock; annual world consumption of helium, assuming 100% recovery rate (which may be possible or almost possible if supply is tight), can be almost produced from the amount of natural gas consumed for non-energy use worldwide, i.e. as industrial feedstock. Which sort of guarantees availability in the future too.

You are absolutely right. I am a lifetime environmentalist, but as I’ve learned I’ve become disenchanted with the current societal direction; it’s more based on ideological foundations than anything that squarely addresses the reality of objective sustainability.

There is so much groupthink (most due to the political manipulation) that you can’t talk to people. They’re so caught up in group messages that they don’t think for themselves or have the data or Mind even get it.

It’s the most worrying thing.

Most of that natural gas should stay under the ground if we want to somewhat mitigate climate change...

Now we just gotta convince our rich overlords that life is more important than more money for the rich. That shouldn't be too hard to accomplish, yeah?

That's part of it. But electricity is still expensive, so I don't see a lot of people wanting to switch their natural gas heating and cooking to electricity anytime soon. We need a massive investment in nuclear and solar to bring down the cost of electricity.

Given that fossil fuels have allowed artificial expansion of the human population that would be sentencing large swathes of people to death.

You can always pump it back after extracting the helium.

That requires you to store a frankly insane volume of gas.

It might happen, but only at vastly higher helium prices.

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