The U.S. just sold its helium stockpile
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
The sale has been in the works for more than a decade. Congress first mandated it through the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. It was initially supposed to occur in 2021, but a series of delays — in part due to the same logistical and regulatory issues threatening shutdowns today — postponed the auction to Thursday.
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.
Why not just not flood the market with cheap helium?
What if helium is cheap and relatively abundant though? Like the way we treat water. Even water has to be sold at a (preferably low) profit so that all the facilities and infrastructure around it can be maintained. In some cases the government does end up paying for water infrastructure but this is often initial setup costs that would be too huge and risky to provide affordable water to small communities if the true cost had to be paid by them in a reasonable time frame.
I read about counter arguments saying that helium is easy enough to source that it is really just an issue of the price/extraction ratio. Because of that, making your own stock pile company doesn't make sense.
Then, I read articles like this, that make me think it has nothing to do with the price/extraction ratio and everything to do with government control of production.
Obviously, I'm never going to do it, but it is a fun thought exercise anyway. I will add though, I've been seeing these helium stories cycle a bit more recently. I wonder what phase we are in.
What about all that material cost sunk into the rocket, that they don't have to spend again for a new one?
What doesn't make sense is overthinking it. If the price of Helium went up over the years, the price of Helium is going to keep going up over the next years. When everyone tells you that we're going to run out, then the value is simply going to go up.
What people say about profitability is irrelevant. What matters is the price trend, not their opinions.
Now go take a look at charts. You're not going to like it. :)
What did the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013 try to solve?
I'm in favor, though sad, of a government ban. It should probably happen slowly so that no one's job is to empty canisters into the open air. Opinions?
Curious, would you mind expanding on where you think the actual problem is?
So the problem is that the uses of helium might not be commensurate with the cost of producing (or rather extracting) it.
So therefore, the fix is to have the uses of helium pay more for it. Unfortunately, the payer of the uses of helium, such as for medical treatment recipients, do not want to pay more. As for balloons, the grade of purity is not sufficient for use in medicine, and thus is not realistically a problem (or the cost of refining it to higher purity is also costly).
But it seems to me it's a case of "we can do both", and in this case conservation of helium might not be a bad idea in addition to changing mining practices to capture it.
Suggests otherwise and is a fascinating read
Your plastic straw doesn’t end up in the ocean unless you litter on a beach trip. Guilt tripped Americans eating fast food make up an unimaginably tiny amount of ocean plastic waste.
It isn’t a “we can do both” situation for either matter. It’s a popular deception that makes people feel like they’re helping which almost entirely distracts from the actual issues. The “thoughts and prayers” response that is worse than useless.
Compare with liquid nitrogen: you can liquify air, use the nitrogen that sooner or later will go back to the atmosphere, but it rarely leaves the planet. So you have a cycle.
I'm genuinely not going to know what you think the actual problem is if you don't tell me. I promise I tried looking it up before responding.
Edit: I hadn't thought about purity requirements. Helium baloons do require significantly lower purity than medical uses. So how that lower grade stuff is treated as a whole is the part to consider, rather than helium baloon revenue.
10% H2 in N2 is not good for lifting... let alone 4%.
---
Oh, and, tri-atomic CO2 is very heavy (44 g/mol). So, waving the ideal gas law around, it really doesn't make sense to use that for lifting purposes at all when you have other, smaller things around.
> The flammability range for hydrogen in air is 4% - 74%, and even though it ignites with difficulty at dilutions higher than 10%, you would still have to dilute it like mad in order to get a provably non-flammable lifting gas
But it could not combust inside the balloon because H doesn't combine with N (at least I don't think it does!). It would have to be released, and then mixed with air to burn. If the balloon popped would it disperse faster than it could burn? I don't know, and simple chemistry would not provide an answer.
One would have to do experiments.
1. Pure nitrogen is lighter than air. Not enough to lift a balloon, but enough to make the balloon lighter than an air filled one. So it would be a good gas to mix with the hydrogen. Nitrogen gas is cheap, too.
2. Helium could be mixed in with the hydrogen, so the hydrogen would not be concentrated enough to ignite. This would reduce the quantity of helium needed.
We’ve already had half a dozen threads about the industrial uses of helium. Not relevant?
If helium balloons cost $100 each vastly fewer of them would be sold. If they cost $100 but you could get $90 back by bringing them back to the store for the helium to be recycled, much less helium would be consumed.
If there is a limited supply of helium for essential medical use, the price should rise until either demand is affected or less of it gets discarded by hydrocarbon extractors. If this doesn't happen we are probably ok.
However the management of helium as a resource needs to be thought of as “the entire time that humans will exist on Earth”, since it’s an almost completely non renewable resource where after using it once it’s often lost forever.
Peat (the dead stuff, not the live moss) takes THOUSANDS of years to grow. Once used up it cannot be replaced within human civilization time scales. So of course we burn it for electricity and use it to grow potted plants...