Helium is essential but nonrenewable and difficult to recycle | Hacker News Reader

Helium is essential but nonrenewable and difficult to recycle

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176 pointsPaulHoule171 comments

Helium is a byproduct of natural gas production. Only a few wells are even setup to capture it because of the associated economic cost.

If we really care about conserving helium we would probably not vent it directly into the atmosphere while extracting natural gas.

Party balloons are not the problem here.

The issue is mostly with our refining capabilities. Helium is mixed with natural gas as it travels from wells to compressor stations which push it down the pipeline to the refinery for separation. There are only 14 refineries in the world set up to capture helium, half of which are in the United States.

Building new refineries can take decades and is extremely expensive. The refinery and wells also must be located near radioactive reserves which decay and produce the helium.

You're absolutely right about party balloons not being an existential threat. There are two types of Helium for commercial sale: balloon-grade and Ultra High Purity Grade. Balloon grade Helium is used strictly for balloons and is not adequate to be used as a shielding gas or in any medical capacity. Ultra High Purity Grade has undergone the scrubbing process after extraction, and is safe for welding, industrial and medical applications.

Isn't the resource being consumed the same though? I imagine ultra high grade is just more refined? Or is the balloon grade gas not economically refinable to the pure gas?

Not just non-economical, but like almost all purification processes you will be producing balloon grade from the production of the ultra pure gas. Intrinsicly there will be helium that you can't separate from the other gasses that you removed from the helium.

Some non-zero remainder is all but inevitable, but even if your refining process yields 1 part pure to 99 parts mixed, after N steps you have 1 - (0.99) ^ N percent pure gas out of the whole, right?

So the ratio is somewhat arbitrarily (up to whatever the limit of your refining process is).

This assumes that the refining process works the same no matter what the initial concentration is. (Don't know if it's true or not, but it's an unstated assumption.)

Balloon gas is already 99% helium. There’s not that much of it (one source is apparently as a byproduct of filling pure helium containers) and reprocessing it is not economical.

Unfortunately that doesn't usually hold out because as things get closer but not quite to the purity you need, you tend to need longer times, larger surfaces areas, higher temps, etc. in order to continue the process. You tend to hit spots during purification where you end up with an Azetrope (or similar for gasses) where you can't do a lot of the same techniques anymore because the impurities and the gas you want end up behaving the same at that concentration. At that point you have to start looking at adding catalysts or other chemical reactions to destroy or transform the impurities so that you can remove the end products from those reactions. But as you have less and less of the impurities it then ends up harder to target them to purify further. It's a nasty cycle that can drive costs up exponentially in terms of reagents, dollars, time and energy needed to do the purification. Ethyl Alcohol is a fun little rabbit hole to look at, at ~95% purity it forms an azetrope with water and you can no longer distill off the water or alcohol separately and have to resort to chemical or other means to get further purity. That's why you usually end up with other alcohols as a byproduct when purifying further (methanol in particular, since it disrupts the azetrope and lets you boil things off) or have to take rather expensive methods that remove the water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope

The idea of "balloon-grade" led me down a rabbit hole. It seems that there are many defined grades of He with the majority being grade 5 (99.999% purity, 2 steps down from the purest) and the majority of He used, including in balloons is grade 5 due to ease of transporting just one grade. That made it cheaper to use grade 5 for party balloons than artificially reducing the quality.

In the last few years there has been more low quality balloon grade (97.5% purity) produced by refineries in the US, increasing the availability and reducing the cost.

http://www.kornbluthheliumconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/... https://zephyrsolutions.com/what-are-the-different-grades-of...

Couldn't you just buy high purity helium and mix in some air close to the point of sale?

you're not going to save much cost by doing that 99 -> 97% isnt much difference in helium. the difficulty is not in the quantity of helium but the purity. if you dont care much about the purity it will be cheaper to produce.

Worse, oil wells frequently flame off natural gas because it's not economical to capture it from those wells.

So there are layers of waste.

It's still better to flare it than to vent it without flaring [0]. In Texas there's a huge problem of wells venting without flaring that's been documented by some groups with IR cameras [1].

[0]: https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/natural-gas-flaring-and...

[1]: https://youtu.be/y4eDlG9U25c

> It's still better to flare it than to vent it without flaring [0].

Yes, though that's just because methane is itself 2 orders of magnitude worse for the environment than carbon dioxide, not because combustion itself is actually good.

if combustion removes 99% of the methane's global warming potential, what would count as 'actually good' in your eyes?

(or if you mean combustion in the abstract, not in this particular situation, keep in mind that aerobic respiration is combustion; without combustion the only life forms that would continue to exist would be anaerobic bacteria)

This still becomes another CO2 emission that is unnecessary. Depending on the quantity of CO2 being emitted by this combustion compared to simply requiring the methane to be captured, it’s still bad. It’s still CO2 emissions.

be careful about trying to decide what's necessary for other people; they may decide that the carbon dioxide emission of your breathing is unnecessary, and that it would be better to permanently sequester your carbon

maybe you think that you, or people like you, are the ones who would be making the decisions about what is necessary and what is unnecessary. that is a dangerously naïve viewpoint; power and coercion have their own logic

Maybe they are clearly differentiating deep sequested carbon from gas wells from surface carbon cycles and not making veiled threats and muddy sophistry.

it is true that the threat tayloralexander was making was not at all veiled

The “threat” that a government might regulate the operations of a corporation is not a threat at all, that’s a very normal policy discussion. Your suggestion that I am inviting threats against people is an fantasy and unrelated to this discussion.

certainly discussing whether liberalism or authoritarianism is better is a very normal policy discussion, but that doesn't mean that advocating authoritarianism isn't threatening. it's far more threatening than simply pointing a gun at someone. and when governments start prohibiting things because they're not necessary you have descended pretty far into authoritarianism; you're in north korea 'illegal microwave oven' and 'unapproved haircut' territory

how many of the things you did today were necessary?

even if the answer is more than zero, that's probably only because you interpreted 'necessary' as 'necessary to taylor alexander'. but you can rest assured that an authoritarian government will not interpret it that way unless you are the head of state

I’m sorry but this is nonsense. If corporations burning methane is an alternative to capturing it then from an engineering perspective those emissions are not strictly necessary - that is, a solution exists which would not require those emissions. Regulators could decide to require this capture equipment. The potential down side would be costs to operators which must be considered.

This has absolutely nothing to do with deciding who is allowed to breathe and to suggest otherwise is absurd.

The wells could be capturing the natural gas for productive combustion. Or just leaving it underground. The wells didn’t build themselves.

The gas that is flared comes with oil production. Good idea to capture it for productive use, but if you want the oil you have to deal with the gas. Unlike oil where you can move small amounts of it via truck, you need a pipeline to the wellhead to move natural gas to market. Expensive to do locally and very hard to build new, long distance pipelines to bring it to market in states not called Texas.

Sorry, if they flare it, that means they channel it through a chimney, so why is it expensive to collect it?

It's my understanding that harvesting the gasses is a more complex and involved process than burning them off. The gear and infrastructure is expensive, even if you have something in place for flaring, therefore it normally isn't done for smaller wells.

There's interesting work being done to make some forms of wellhead capture more feasible though.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/11/13/capturing-wellhead-gase...

Two main reasons AFIK: unstable output (high volume burst but little to no output most of the time) and chemical composition which would require further refining before the gas can be sold.

The challenging is getting the gas from a remote well location to a plant where it can be processed. This requires pipelines, gas gathering facilities, etc. If any of that infrastructure is experiencing an upset condition, the operator has to choose between shutting in the well or flaring the gas. Shutting in the well can be undesirable because it's still producing oil to tanks, and oil is where most of the profit is from. A shut-down well can also be hard to get going again.

On the party balloon front, it's time to stop selling those on the San Francisco peninsula. SF Muni is only 600V. Caltrain is 25KV traction power. Power is now on in some sections. The western US has never had 25KV overhead traction power until this month. 25KV is far more dangerous, and the catenary wire isn't that high up, closer than the length of some balloon strings.

Rather long and grim Network Rail (UK) public service announcement.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udaS3NDCkk0

I don't know if it's common in the UK, I would guess not, but we have had thousands of kilometers of 25kV lines in France for half a century now, and I have never heard of people being electrocuted because their balloons had touched the catenaries.

You mean to tell me that people don't often go around with balloons on 10 meter long strings?

Quite a lot of 25kV AC overhead in the UK. I'm sure it is possible to create a dangerous situation with those and a helium balloon, but it seems to be very rare. I don't think this is a real problem.

That seems beyond silly. Any pointers to sources where problems with balloons contacting high-tension lines have actually occurred?

I don't see why party balloons haven't moved to hydrogen, myself. They'd add a bit of spark to the occasion.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110628230230/http://abclocal.g...

https://web.archive.org/web/20120721050712/http://latimesblo...

Amazing how hard it is to find an account of an actual event, isn't it.

Ever look inside an old-style flashbulb, where a tangle of fine wires takes the place of a conventional incandescent bulb's filament? That's what you'd have if a metalized balloon were to somehow bridge the hot and ground conductors on a high-tension power line. The event would last about as long, and the power company wouldn't even notice it.

(Interestingly it is possible to attack power transmission facilities by dumping bundles of carbon filaments all over them ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb ). But you're not going to do any damage with a couple of party balloons.)

> Amazing how hard it is to find an account of an actual event, isn't it.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mylar-balloons-and-power-lines-...

Thanks. Crazy how fragile that system must be. Don't they have reclosers?

"If brushfire risk is even a consideration, it would be best to follow the published “Energy Safe” guidelines which indicate that reclosing should be turned off when the fire risk is high."[1]

Reclosing works best when the main problem is lightning. But this is in California. Dry climate, high fire risk most of the year, multiple huge fires started by power line contact in recent years, and not much lightning. PG&E is gradually moving to underground cables where lines can't be well clear of trees, and is now much more aggressive about tree trimming. Compare Florida, with high humidity and many lightning strikes. There, reclosing is a big win, since most trips are from lightning.

[1] https://www.tdworld.com/test-and-measurement/article/2096949...

Why is that a problem? A great number of Russian mainlines are 25K AC, including Transsib branches. That does seem like a world standard for rail.

It’s weird they always find a way to blame the average person.

The large group of average people hold control under democracy, so if a small group of remarkable people want to see change, they have to appeal to the average person.

Appeal = ?

The math adds up.

Agreed. My old naive self used to think there was some benefit to making the "average person" aware of the issue at large so they would care about it and potentially agitate for a fix (if enough people cared about it), but then I realized it was a total headfake to distract from the real issue.

Water conservation is my favorite example. Yeah, let's all worry about not washing our cars when meanwhile agriculture and industry uses orders of magnitude more water and often has 0 incentives to reduce use.

An aside but another good reason to not wash your car is leeching harmful stuff in the environment, car washes have to purify the waste water where I'm from at least

We don't wash our cars much here but being told to shower less while big Ag is growing almonds in the desert is a slap in the face.

Car washes have to purify the water because they are washing dozens of cars a day every day and generating orders of magnitude more runoff waste than you or I could ever from car washing.

if all "you or I" wash at home then that's the actual "orders of magnitude more runoff waste" compared to if everybody did it at the car wash. Car washes have to purify the water since it's actually possible to do it there since all the washes happen at the same place

Car washes probably induce demand for washes. After all the fact you are paying $7 to wash in 10 mins is because the good old driveway method is too inconvenient. Once again the dose makes the poison. Whats my runoff relative to the rest of the area? Small. Whats the runoff of a concentrated source like a car wash? Massive relative to what is running off in the rest of the area. Dramatically shifting the contents of that runoff in terms of what they are.

As the poster above this beautifully states:

> Corporations are extensions of the desires of the average person

The agriculture sector is not just wasting water for the fun of it. They're producing food for us, the consumers of food. Some of the food is more efficient with respect to water-use than other food. So you've got basically two, non-mutually-exclusive options:

1. Inform / expect individuals to make better choices (e.g., eat less beef, drink less milk, etc.), so that our aggregate demand for these products decreases, and the supply (production) follows.

2. Government intervention to, e.g., tax inefficient foods and/or subsidize efficient ones to nudge consumers in the right direction. Given our politics in the US, I don't see this as happening anytime soon. I remember the shrieks of "THEY'RE COMING FOR OUR ICE CREAM!!!" as a rallying cry against The Green New Deal a few years ago.

There is no "us" and "them" for responsibility of these things. It's everyday people, in aggregate, causing every environmental and social ill. It's complicated, but pretending it's entirely that guy's fault (damn agriculture!) is to shirk your tiny sliver of personal responsibility. You can choose to do better. Or you can wait for government to make you do better. But the end result will be much the same.

"Vote with your wallet" rarely ever works. "Nudging" consumers won't work either. You're never going to convince an entire population to voluntarily stop eating almonds because their production wastes water. If we learned anything from COVID it should be that you're never going to be able to convince millions of people to take any kind of specific, cooperative, collective action on anything--even if their lives are at stake.

Instead of sitting back and hoping that millions will do some inconvenient action, why not instead focus on regulating the few dozens of entities actually causing the problem?

Totally. My point is: one can both take individual action and advocate for regulation. They're not mutually exclusive options. I feel like "nothing will happen until it's regulated" is often used as an excuse for inaction. I know tons of people who think climate change is a huge problem, but drive cars that get under 20mpg, who eat steak dinners multiple times per week, etc. Their stance is basically "I'll put in 0 effort to do better until the government makes everyone do better". And many politicans' takes are: "why should the U.S. put in any effort until everyone (usually relatively poor countries like China, India, etc.) starts improving?"

I have little confidence that significant-enough regulation is possible. We need people to do better while also advocating for the government to take actual, meaningful steps.

To address a few of your points specifically:

> "Nudging" consumers won't work either. You're never going to convince an entire population to voluntarily stop eating almonds because their production wastes water.

Yes. It can. See: cigarette use for example. Taxation works. If almonds are heavily taxed, and cost, e.g., 2x what they do today, you can reasonably expect almond consumption to drop.

> regulating the few dozens of entities actually causing the problem

Again, the "entities actually causing the problem" rounds down to "all of us". Exxon-Mobile isn't just creating CO2 emissions for fun. We're buying gasoline from them because,collectively, a bunch of us want to live in suburbs, drive big comfortable SUV's, etc. Sure, Exxon-Mobile is very interested in maintaining the status-quo, and it's a shame they have the power/cash to do so. But collective individuals as U.S. voters and consumers refuse to change their habits, and generally vote against politicians willing to do anything that'd inflict any inconvenience / change on their lives. Every time gas prices go up even slightly, people lose their minds.

I feel like nearly every sentence in your comment grossly misses the point. Of course I expect agriculture to use more water, and it's a good thing that we all have more than enough to eat. The issue is there are often no regulations put in place to incentivize agriculture to use water efficiently and economically. I mean, please point out to me "the average person" in California that desires to grow alfalfa so it can be shipped overseas to China and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile we're pretending making people ask for water at restaurants makes any difference at all when it comes to water savings.

> There is no "us" and "them" for responsibility of these things.

Baloney. Warren Buffet was right when he said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." I'd have no problem supporting water restrictions locally if it wasn't just a total distraction, a "going through the motions" if you will, while the biggest users of water do nothing.

Edit: coincidentally, I just saw this article on NYT just after posting this comment: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/climate/california-merced... . There should be no restrictions on local users of water until agriculture is addressed.

When we try solve a problem by saying people should do something, we are solving it as a society. Which means we should solve it a societal level, not by making it responsibility of one part of society to do individually.

In this case, it can’t be just city dwellers responsibility but farmers too. What individual resp in this case means that it is easier to persuade individual residents than individual farmers. Or that they don’t care about problem and dumping responsibility for it where nothing will happen.

I agree with the "class warfare" quote. But aren't "the rich" pretty much the ones pushing these anti-regulatory sentiments?

I agree, these regulations you're pointing out aren't sufficient. But I maintain, I think the finger-pointing crap is a distraction. Nobody's going to do anything when they can point their finger at the bigger-offender, and feel vindicated in their own inaction. And since numbers are so easily fudgable, everyone feels this way (see: leading U.S. politicians blaming Africa for climate change [1], about as ridiculous a claim as is imaginable)

[1] https://blog.ucsusa.org/derrick-jackson/house-speaker-mike-j...

Because there only is the average person.

Corporations are extensions of the desires of the average person.

If you give people the rundown on helium, of course they will be incredulous that gas drillers are just venting it.

But if you tell them that capturing it will increase their energy bill by a few dollars a month, suddenly they will find sources that say the helium shortage is blown out of proportion and not really something to worry about.

Everyone wants to do the right thing, but only a handful are willing to sacrifice even an inch for it. Corporations are just the physical manifestations of this behavior.

“ Corporations are extensions of the desires of the average person”

Not true. The people who own and manage corporations only follow the desires of the average person when it’s convenient and profitable for them. They also put in a lot of effort to shape the desires of the average person in a way that’s profitable for them.

That is support for the point, not contradiction.

It is profitable because it what the consumer wants.

In general, if people really want guilt free products, and are willing to pay a premium, someone will make and sell them.

Profitability does not depend on "what the consumer wants". It depends on what you can sell. Usually selling the consumer what they want is the most naive and least profitable way of doing that. If business were only concerned with giving consumers what they want, advertising agencies would go out of business.

If you want to maximise profitability, you need to make the consumer want things they don't need, then sell it to them in the most unfulfilling way you can get away with at the least cost to you. This is why the game industry is so desperately moving to subscription models (following the greater trend in software) and why Amazon is full of thousands of nearly indistinguishable brands selling you the same flawed goods. The benefit of this model is that you can also better compete on price (because you don't have to compete on quality) and normalize buying the same damn thing over and over again instead of having it last half a lifetime. If you do need to seem like you compete on quality, just add flashy new features of questionable use and remove old ones - often enough you can just cycle back after a few generations.

And if you're really lucky you can frame your product as a lifestyle or fashion good. Like there's now literally a current trend of people buying a specific travel mug as a fashion and lifestyle item. Filling their storage cabinets with dozens of these things in different colors or buying useless accessories for their accessory travel cup. This isn't driven by the consumers wanting travel mugs, this is entirely driven by selling the idea to consumers that they must own this specific travel mug and must have at least one in every color that is necessary to match their outfits. If it wasn't for advertising, nobody would buy them.

Nobody is holding a gun to the customer head and forcing them to buy travel mugs. They want them. They want them because of a trend and advertising, but they want them nonetheless.

As proof, I submit the fact that I don't want one and don't have a cabinet full of them.

Companies don't care what people want, as long as they want something. That could be eco-friendly free range coffee mugs, but the customers aren't interested in that

> They want them because of a trend and advertising

Yes. Humans are not rational economic actors. Humans are social creatures that can be manipulated through social engineering. That is my point. Holding a gun to a person's head is the most blunt and crude form of manipulation and also happens to be illegal. Modern advertising is a lot more refined than that.

What I contested was this:

> It is profitable because it what the consumer wants.

If you mean "it's profitable because it sells", then that is nearly tautological and I have no idea why you'd feel like you'd have to say that. What I assumed you meant was what people usually mean, i.e. "it is profitable because it fulfills a pre-existing need consumers wish to satisfy". My reply dissected that (common) claim at every step:

1. It is more profitable to induce a perceived need than to find a pre-existing need.

2. It is more profitable to only fulfill a need temporarily so you can sell to the same consumers multiple times.

3. It is more profitable to fulfill a need inadequately so consumers don't stop looking for a new way to fulfill the need after the purchase.

Implying that consumer choices are made freely in a vacuum without manipulation (i.e. what "not holding a gun to your head" implies) when we literally have billboards on the side of walls and advertisements blaring from every screen all the time and an entire caste of people literally referred to as "influencers" to appear authentic while trying to make you buy things is a bit disingenuous. And that doesn't even factor in the actual options available to consumers and how they are limited or their ease of how their access can drastically vary with zero relation to the underlying resource cost.

The reason we don't have eco-friendly free range coffee mugs is (aside from that not being a meaningful descriptor) that the coffee mug market is extremely saturated and coffee mugs are a solved problem because it's cheap to make long-lsting coffee mugs and the number of coffee mugs each consumer needs is very limited. The reason everyone's buying these overpriced coffee mugs is not that they need coffee mugs, it's that they have an induced desire for what that specific brand of coffee mugs represents.

> As proof, I submit the fact that I don't want one and don't have a cabinet full of them.

Either you're the one perfectly rational human who is more immune to social cues than the most autistic introvert, or you've just discovered that you're not part of the target audience of fancy fashion lifestyle coffee mugs. There is more than one consumer identity.

Heck, there are even consumer identities for people who think they're immune to advertising and influencers. Who do you think all those Che Guevara t-shirts and "nuke the whales" posters were sold to in the 1990s (before they became "ironic" fashion-wear)? The Devil Wears Prada had better media literacy than that: https://artdepartmental.com/blog/devil-wears-prada-cerulean-...

To quote Garfield: You're not immune to propaganda.

> They want them because of a trend and advertising

>>Yes. Humans are not rational economic actors. Humans are social creatures that can be manipulated through social engineering. That is my point. Holding a gun to a person's head is the most blunt and crude form of manipulation and also happens to be illegal. Modern advertising is a lot more refined than that.

Agreed

> It is profitable because it what the consumer wants.

>>If you mean "it's profitable because it sells", then that is nearly tautological and I have no idea why you'd feel like you'd have to say that. What I assumed you meant was what people usually mean, i.e. "it is profitable because it fulfills a pre-existing need consumers wish to satisfy".

My point is closer to what you called tautological, and my point is that it is not accurate to attribute choice, agency, or control to the consumer, while attributing full agency, control, and responsibility to seller. If you want to make a critical judgement about corporations selling crap for profit, at a minimum, you have to be open to a critical judgement about consumers wanting crap. There is a duality to it and feedback loop. If people weren't hungry to buy prestige, sex appeal, or fleeting distractions from their problems, crap wouldnt sell, and advertising for it wouldnt work.

Restated, what I object to is holding individual human desires and preference as flawless or perfect, and refusing to acknowledge the causal role it plays in what products are produced and profitable.

You can't simultaneously hold that corporations are exploiting a flaw in consumer psychology without admitting that consumers have a psychological flaw.

>The reason everyone's buying these overpriced coffee mugs is not that they need coffee mugs, it's that they have an induced desire for what that specific brand of coffee mugs represents....Either you're the one perfectly rational human who is more immune to social cues than the most autistic introvert, or you've just discovered that you're not part of the target audience of fancy fashion lifestyle coffee mugs. There is more than one consumer identity.

The fact that different target markets exist is itself evidence that differences exist in consumer desire and response to advertising. People have different levels of response to advertising, and different response to different kinds. I dont claim to be immune to it, but I do think that people can be more or less susceptible, and personally strive to align my consumption with realistic long term self interest.

I think that individuals play a role in commodification and consumerist behavior, and this can be reduced by thought, introspection, and cultural shifts. If there is a "solution", I dont think it is a world where individuals are lusting for crap that provides distraction or short-term satisfaction, and corporate restraint is only thing that keeps it from being produced.

Each of your core claims have corollaries:

>1. It is more profitable to induce a perceived need than to find a pre-existing need.

I dont know if I agree. The world has a lot of real big and expensive problems. Housing, healthcare, human development, sustainability. There is a lot of money to be made if individuals see these as a priority.

>2. It is more profitable to only fulfill a need temporarily so you can sell to the same consumers multiple times.

Customers prefer cheap short term solutions to more expensive or painful long term solutions. Long term solutions are expensive. See #1

>3. It is more profitable to fulfill a need inadequately so consumers don't stop looking for a new way to fulfill the need after the purchase.

Buy it for life products exist, and most dont buy them, for various reasons. Somehow advertising is less effective.

"It is profitable because it what the consumer wants."

My point is that they often manipulate consumers into wanting what's profitable.

sure, wants all come from somewhere.

If something isnt wanted, it cant be profitable.

Wouldn't liquefaction to produce LNG automatically separate out the helium, or at least concentrate it in a residuum of minor gases?

I'd guess the helium comes out mixed with the liquid, and just vents out faster at the beginning of the storage time.

Helium is not very soluble in liquid methane. Some will dissolve, but unless the He concentration was very low I don't think it's going to all or even mostly dissolve.

Also, LNG typically undergoes a step where dissolved nitrogen (which is typically several percent of natural gas) is flashed to vapor. Helium is less soluble than nitrogen in LNG, so the helium will be flashed off also. There's then the problem of separating the helium and nitrogen, but presumably that's an easier problem.

I recall a panic about us running out of helium a few years ago followed by abrupt silence as the increased cost of helium led to more helium being salvaged from natural gas extraction. It's one of those rare cases where you can literally point at a moment in time and see a textbook example of "the market" in action.

I also recall that then too there were articles about how us foolish consumers were wasting this non-renewable good on party balloons while the actual amount of helium used to fill party balloons is less than a rounding error compared to how much helium industry needs and uses (which in turn is nothing compared to how much uncaptured helium is lost during natural gas extraction).

Until recently, Formula One teams used Helium in their wheel guns as it spins them faster. In their push to be more environmentally friendly the sanctioning bodies realized that banning the use of pneumatic helium was an easy win.

My favourite F1 tire gas story is when Ferrari used a refrigerant gas (HFC 404a) to inflate the tyres instead of the usual nitrogen.

The gas has mutch better heat transfer properties and helped with cooling, which gave them a slight advantage.

Not sure if they utilised a full-on refrigerant cycle within the tyre (liquid being thrown against the inside and evaporating) or similar a higher density and heat capacity, giving improved connections heat transfer, but pretty interesting nonetheless. Was banned soon after, of course.

https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/threads/ferraris-tire-gas-...

Edit: definitely the latter, pressure nowhere near high enough to go liquid

This was probably in the old days of F1 when teams could do whatever they wanted. Nowadays Pirelli is responsible for mounting the tires on the wheels and inflating them to spec.

A few days ago some people on this forum were arguing that H2 is safe, just has an unfair reputation, and is a suitable replacement for gasoline.

Well, is safety's not a concern, then for many applications H2 is a suitable or superior alternative to He that is abundant and renewable.

More lift

More heat transport

Faster c

Only 10K higher Tb

Unless you're dealing with unsaturated carbohydrates easy win!

Heck, at work we are trying to retrofit our He system to run on H2 to get a massive performance boost (my idea) and ditch the He recycling system.

You wouldn't believe the pushback I got! Eventually we realized we couldn't hit the performance metrics without H2, but these folks were all upset about H2 heated to 800K. Cowards.

Where is safety not a concern? Apart from the obvious risk of blowing up, every structural material has to be reviewed for hydrogen embrittlement. Call me a coward but I would not work near a substantial quantity of 800K hydrogen either.

I was taking a jab at people who, a few days ago, were arguing that H2 is just as safe or safer than gasoline.

I'm scared of gasoline, and petrified of H2. But our project needs H2

For many but not MRIs as the super conducting material most commonly used, niobium-titanium, is not a super conductor at the boiling point of hydrogen.

Meh. Soon enough we'll have REBCO based MRIs.

I looked around last week to see if they are on the market yet, and found that Philips already seems to have helium-free MRIs for sale. I'm not sure if they just sealed it better or switched to REBCO.

edit: nvm, finally found more info. it's just better sealed helium https://www.usa.philips.com/healthcare/resources/landing/the...

My understanding is that most of the experiments for NMR with REBCO at this point are geared towards high field NMR (like 30T) whereas medical NMR field strength is down around 1-3T.

I don’t know what the cost delta is between LTS and HTS magnets, but I imagine the much broader applicability of HTS will bring manufacturing costs way down with economies of scale.

In the interim, people are still trying to figure out effective ways to joint the HTS sections.

I was being cheeky (at those who were recently minimizing the risks H2)

He is not renewable, but is self generating through every alpha emitting mineral in the Earth slipping through cracks until trapped in a gas chamber.

And there's a lot of alpha emitting nuclei on Earth.

I believe there's a lot less then the current production rate. The atmospheric loss rate is 50 grams/second, 1,600 tonnes/year, so the radiogenic production should balance that. The production rate is 169 million m^3 or 29,000 tonnes.

(Should be balanced because we're at equilibrium, there's no other significant source, solar wind is comparatively small, and the atmospheric reservoir is large relative to the short-lived human contribution).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape#Dominant_at...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Modern_extraction_and_d...

I did the calculations once and the amount of fusion needed to produce the current rate of consumption of helium would more or less equal the energy received from the sun over the entire planet. In other words we'd need fusion plants producing enough energy to boil the oceans and kill us all.

Of course that's different than the energy economics of decay, but still the sense being that there are scales involved which don't necessarily mean that production would be even nearby by dozens of orders of magnitude.

Sun is full of it, just shove a pipe into it and pump out what we need. And no need to mess with "blue hydrogen", this will give us virtually unlimited amounts of yellow hydrogen as a byproduct.

This. The heat won't be an issue if you do it at night.

I love it, but don't you think we'll need to pipe the trace amounts of O2 to burn the yellow H2 with?

Who said anything about fusion? Fusion's ridiculous. Fission too.

My point is that even if we, the humans of the 21st century, can run out of He, the Earth can't. Even us humans can't run out of it - we'll boil off the atmosphere with CO2 before we run out of CH4 wells.

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe. But it is an ideal gas, and very light, which means it is hard for a terrestrial planet, like earth, to retain it. Unfortunately bringing helium to earth from the gas planets isn't really economically viable.

Helium is also a byproduct of both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Although I don't know how viable it is to capture it.

Helium is also used in leak detection machines. A friend of mine works for a company that makes those machines. Simplifying the process is: you fill an item with helium, put it in a vacuum chamber inside the machine, a mass spectrometer checks if there is more helium than expected. If positive, there is a leak.

They use helium because it's not reactive and it's tiny but not too tiny like hydrogen, which he says it's harder to contain. I just checked and the hydrogen molecule is indeed smaller than the helium atom, 120 pm vs 140 pm van der Waals radius. Furthermore, as many candidates as helium alternatives, there is too much hydrogen around and it's not clear what the mass spectrometer is reading: a leak or some leftover from the vacuuming process?

Anyway, they were hit by the spike in helium costs years ago. Not so much to steer them and their industry to something different. Their customers need to check for leaks no matter what.

I'd argue helium being non-reactive is 100 times more important than being larger than hydrogen in "why we choose it over hydrogen".

Not really. The transport of helium and hydrogen through potential leaking sites is just different enough that they are sensitive to different things and appropriate for different uses. So hydrogen is indeed sometimes used for leak checking.

...though the inert gases (helium, argon, various freons) being inert sure does help make them popular.

I've done some work on chemical plants with hydrogen. Through a long chain of people (I was nowhere near the actual bare metal operations) I got a very strong impression that sealing hydrogen is a pain in the ass, it makes its way through every joint and seal. I'm sure some of it is reactivity but it being tiny I think also causes it. I know some of the machines must never be turned off because the sheen created by the ongoing reaction helps to seal it

At least, it is 100 times more important than the atomic radius to explain why it leaks more.

(Or, rather, it's some number of times where people only care about the exponent.)

I thought He is mostly alpha-radiation capturing a few electrons. I.e. that it is produced by radio isotope reserves and escapes no matter what one does. And not that it was in big pockets of pre-existing gas that one is exhausting.

So it may have different consequences than other resources.

No helium definitely collects in, for example, natural gas deposits.

I bought some shares in TSX:RHC after reading endless articles about helium being necessary and vital. Still waiting for that stock to jump.

This has been a known problem since I started scuba diving in 2003. It may take a long time before you see any movement.

The article does not even mention Helium-3, which is rare but can provide limitless clean energy to power humanity for billions of years. It fuses to stable beryllium and thus does not have any of the usual problems with waste storage and disposal. We don't have the technology yet to build a fusion reactor this hot (we haven't even mastered D-T fusion for energy production), but it's inevitable that 3-He will some day become humans' primary energy source. Future generations will be annoyed that they have to recapture it from the atmosphere because we let it escape.

Good news: Virtually all helium-3 used in industry today is produced from the radioactive decay of tritium in reactors, given its very low natural abundance and its very high cost.

Tritium, in turn is produced from lithium- 6. Between 1.9% and 7.8% of terrestrial lithium in normal materials consists of lithium-6

>It fuses to stable beryllium

Source? 3He+D does not produce beryllium, it produces 4He+P

And under those conditions you'd also get significant D-D fusion too, producing T, 3He, protons, and neutrons

I mean 3He+3He -> 2 Be. This is a fusion reaction that would produce only a stable element. Of course, there would be side reactions and the reaction vessel itself would be constantly bombarded with neutrons. However, you definitely would not have the situation we have now, where uranium is burned up to just produce some slightly lighter but still radioactive metal that then has to be isolated from the environment for tens of thousands of years. It would be a big improvement.

The waste issue is the least pressing problem the Nuclear industry has. The total quantity of the stuff is tiny. Like you could stuff all of the nuclear waste produced by power plants in the US into a few Olympic size swimming pools. It's only a political issue, and the workaround is to just store the waste on-site at the power plants which has been feasible despite decades of pushback against permanent waste sites. Try doing that with a coal plant and they would be completely buried under a mountain of flyash within a month.

So this reaction is solving a problem that isn't really a problem. The big issue is the cost, and that's one area where Fusion power has yet to show any benefit. An economically practical fusion reactor is still a pipe dream, especially as renewables continue to chip away at the price of electricity and as storage costs continue to fall.

I don't know anything about MRI machines, but couldn't they be built with high temperature superconductors and use liquid nitrogen? If anything this feels like a cost issue not a pure technology issue...

The simpler thing to do seems to regulate helium use in birthday balloons.. not a hard choice between life saving diagnostics and large numerically shaped balloons..

Party balloons are normally filled with what’s known as “balloon gas”. It’s a mix of air and helium that’s not suitable for use in medical equipment.

Balloon gas is 97% helium, so from a helium consumption standpoint it's about the same either way:

https://www.boc.com.au/shop/en/au/balloon-gas

I had to do some digging to find more about this.

> "Balloon Grade" Helium represents a slightly impure Helium. While there is no scientific definition of this quality, it is often accepted that the purity of "Balloon Grade" Helium is around 99%

https://www.quantum-technology.com/recover/balloon-grade-hel...

Sounds high, but not pure enough for MRI applications, and it isn't currently economical to reliquefy without shipping it to a processor.

> Manufacturers have stated that this wasted helium is considered a ‘recycled product’ as it would have been lost to the environment had it not been captured and re-purposed. If the balloon market demand declined, manufacturers would have to re-evaluate other markets and consider the possibilities of re-liquefying it. Re-liquefying is currently considered uneconomical from the locations of where the filling application take place.

https://www.partysafe.eu/balloon-and-gas-helium

Also it's small, but not insignificant, sector of the market:

> "A reasonable estimate is that latex 'party' balloons and their foil equivalent account for between 5% and 7% of the total helium usage."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2012/dec/11/sh...

Why? I like party baloons. My MRI, not so much.

I have 3 foil party balloons still inflated after 2 months and 3 days. I left them by the window as heat from the sun provides kinetic energy to the helium atoms to improve the balloons longevity. These three balloons have provided me with enough joy to keep me inside staring at them all day not outside at risk of injury which ultimately leads to an unnecessary MRI.

> heat from the sun provides kinetic energy to the helium atoms to improve the balloons longevity

How does that work?

Gas pressure is the atoms/molecules bouncing off something else. If the atoms have more energy, then they impart more energy into whatever they bounce off (inside of the balloon), which essentially means higher pressure i.e. the balloon appears inflated again. Until the sun goes away and the OP's party dies for a time. :)

How does that increase longevity, thought? Seems like it just inflates the balloon more?

When those balloons finally fail, sounds like it’s just a matter of time before you end up in the noisy donut once again.

Everything we know is matter and time. No one is immune.

No kidding, tell me about it. My personal odometer is ticking over right now.

Haha, You got this survivor.

My father turned 80 and they kept his mylar balloon around in the living room for at least 18 months. It's one of the few things that survived the cat.

I love this story. There is something about a helium balloon that is awe inspiring to observe. For helium atoms even the sky is not a limit.

idk if not going out for 2 months and 3 days puts you closer or further from the need of an MRI ...

Touché, however i’m joking to illustrate a moot point for no reason at all. I am just pro floaty balloons.

why don't you fund the life-saving diagnostics enough that they can outbid birthday party planners? i'm not convinced birthday party planners are rich enough anywhere in the world that this is an actual problem

I don't know if this is the only reason, but superconuctors have a critical magnetic field that is also related to temperature (higher temp = lower magnetic field). So even if a material is superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperature, that doesn't mean it can produce a strong enough magnetic field for an MRI at that high a temp.

> If anything this feels like a cost issue not a pure technology issue...

It IS a technology issue. High-TC superconductors are basically ceramics, meaning that they are brittle. And a good simulation of MRI experience is being inside a trash can that other people hit with baseball bats.

We are only now starting to get high-TC superconductors in the form of tape, but it's not yet ready to replace low-TC superconductors.

BTW, it's also the reason we're hearing about so many new fusion startups trying to utilize it. It _should_ provide an order of magnitude cost decreases compared to liquid-helium. But it's still something that only startups are using.

The tape is good enough for fusion reactors but not MRIs?

It's good enough for _startups_ working on fusion reactors, they can tolerate a bit of risk. But not for established companies making safety-critical equipment.

And modern MRI machines are not that expensive either, mass production made them surprisingly affordable. A top-of-the-line machine is around $700k, and mid-range devices are $300-$400k (and now I want one in my backyard...).

So the savings on high-TC supeconductors would not be that impressive overall.

Is 700k the manufacturing cost or a retail price? I thought they were close to 2M on the higher res end.

It's a list price. You'll obviously also need to pay for installation, delivery, and service.

There's apparently even a robust second-hand market for them: https://bimedis.com/search/search-items/magnetic-resonance-i...

People don't go inside a running fusion reactor.

The largest NMR spectrometer you can buy today uses high-temperature superconductors and classical ones, but it still cools everything down with liquid helium. As far as I understand you can push more current through the high temperature superconductors when you cool them down more.

NMR spectrometers work on essentially the same mechanism as MRIs, just in a very different form factor. It might even work for MRIs without helium because they have a much lower field (~3-6T) compared to the ~28T of the highest field NMR spectrometer.

The high-temperature superconductors are still pretty new for this field, it took a while to figure out manufacturing them on a scale and quality that could be used for these large magnets.

> NMR spectrometers work on essentially the same mechanism as MRIs, just in a very different form factor.

That's a real understatement :)

A typical NMR spectrometer needs to hold a test tube, and an MRI machine kinda has to hold a whole human.

I wonder if we could use temperature, pressure, and currents to devise a plan to capture helium leaked into our atmosphere before it reaches space?

Someone should probably mention the US National Helium Reserve[0]. Voilà.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

Our only sustainable hope is a deuterium-tritium fusion reactor that produces He-4 as byproduct[1].

OR mining He-3 from Jupiter[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium%E2%80%93tritium_fusi...

[2] https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Futur...

There's some interesting research going on using hydrogen instead of helium for radiosonde launches. The arctic ARM site has been using it for a few years:

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-helium-hydrogen-weather-balloo...

Overheard that the hydrogen dangers aren't as bad when something less compressive is used for the balloon, so a non-flex fabric instead of latex.

Hydrogen is probably just fine for uncrewed balloons. Like everyone has a gas furnace or grill; flammability hazards can be managed.

I live in an area that has a lot of "free range" cattle. The sometimes eat the party balloons the people release at parties and other events. It is not good for the cattle. So there are other good reasons to ban the balloons. Helium conservation may or may not be the best reason to ban the balloons.

Funny, a second (after hydrogen) most abundant element in the Universe is so hard to harvest here on Earth.

Why not just fuse hydrogen nuclei together? The energy produced as a byproduct could be very useful as well

Any day now, it's been five years away for half a century now.

Addendum: Seems many disagree with cold fact.

We've been successfully fusing hydrogen into helium since Philo Farnswith invented his Fusor.

Jazz fusion has been around about as long and has been far more commercially viable

Like Weather Report? Sure, they sold some records. Not so much anymore.

It was ten years away for most of the last 50 years, but recently it has become 5 years away. So, in a strange way, we do seem to be making progress.

Re: addendum. Isn't cold fusion even farther away?

US annual helium production is something like ten kilotons. Fusing 1 ton of deuterium yields about 1e21 J. Total global annual energy usage is something like half of that. Frankly, it'd be kind of inconvenient to generate and then get rid of all the extra energy required to meaningfully augment helium supply (assuming we even had an easy way to do the fusion).

A few ideas for the excess energy 1)power third world countries 2)split beryllium atoms in half 3)space lasers

Ok, then what you do with the other 99.999% of it?

Well, splitting beryllium atoms to make helium would mean a lot less is needed to begin with

I'm not sure if this is a joke or not, but without a self sustaining reaction you're going to be putting in more energy to cause the reactions than you're getting out of it.

Didn't the USA recently auction off its helium reserve properties?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

It failed to finalize a sale*

This is gonna sound dumb, but Peak Helium is supposed to be like in the 22nd century, and it’s actually technically possible to extract it from gas giants using large floating platforms and launch it (with multi-stage, reusable nuclear rockets) to orbit and send it back to Earth. Uranus is probably the best planet for this.

Helium 4 is one of the few bulk substances with enough value per kilogram to be potentially worth shipping across interstellar distances. (Helium 3 easily is valuable enough, but the market for it is tiny.)

The prices of liquid helium are sometimes up to $50-100/liter, which is $400-800/kg. Launch prices from Earth may reach as low as $10-20/kg in the following decades, so it’s not impossible that nuclear analogues of vehicles like Starship could reach $400-800/kg to Earth. Helium-3 is worth orders of magnitude more, and probably can be made to work with expendable chemical rockets from Uranus cloud layer to low Uranus orbit and rendezvous with other near-term propulsion (electric propulsion?) back to Earth, if there was a Big market for low-neutron fusion fuel.

Talking about in 100 years, of course.

So the space nerd side of me almost hopes we use up all our helium so prices are high enough so we can harvest it from the gas giants.

I can't believe it is [current year] and we're still hearing about the helium crisis.

Totally unrelated to this post, I loved the pie chart in this story, which is made using https://www.datawrapper.de. Looks like a nice (and free) website for data visualizations.

With enough power, anything is renewable!

With enough scale there's no renewable power.

Well, iron is non-renewable, copper too, every metal actually. Actually everything we mine is non-renewable.

If anything, helium is the only renewable thing we mine. Helium is just alpha particles produced continuously inside the Earth from the decay chain of uranium and thorium. It was produced for billions of years and will continue to be produced for billions more. It continuously seeps upwards. It stops where other gases are stopped, which is a way of saying you find it in reservoirs of natural gas. There are natural gas field in America yielding more than 1% helium. Helium is just not valuable enough to be worth separating it from natural gas in the majority of cases.

If the market will demand it, it will happen. For all practical purposes, helium is an infinite resource on Earth. However, at a finite price, it is a scarce resource.

Helium floats away.

His point is that more of it floats away naturally or as a result of CH4 extraction than we care to collect primarily because its not economically viable to collect.

Party balloons is not what's causing Earth's He to go where no man has gone before (literally, the solar wind will blow it way past the moon).

What you are saying is that helium is not gravitationally bound to Earth. That is correct.

But even if it were, it would not make any difference. Any gas that leaks in the atmosphere is economically lost. Take Neon. I just googled and found out that liquid neon is a cryogenic refrigerant (like liquid helium). Do you think the neon lost through leaks can be recovered any more than the helium lost through leaks?

Neon is condensed out of the air, any neon lost is just there in the atmosphere waiting to be re-condensed by someone else.

The difference is Neon stays in the atmosphere, while Helium floats to the top and is lost.

I wonder how fast neon is lost in the polar winds.

Why would it get lost? The winds don't put things into orbit, they just mix up the air - if anything they uniformly mix all the gasses keeping even Helium from floating away.

Neon is produced from (cryogenic) separation of air, so, yes?

Well, fun fact: there is more helium in atmosphere (5.2 ppm) than methane (1.8 ppm). And it's not much less than neon (18 ppm).

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2915/the-atmosphere-getting-a-...

Does it float away at a higher rate than it is produced by the aforementioned particle decay?

We should put it in childrens party balloons and let it all fly up into the atmosphere. That is definitely the best use of it.

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