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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Almost all natural gas wells just vent the helium they produce to the atmosphere. Helium balloons won’t ever be the culprit in a shortage. This is a plastic straw ban kind of issue, visible to people but pointless because the actual problem is elsewhere.

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So where is the problem? The rate of the mining? The efficiency? I would assume that helium baloons wouldn't be the culprit in a shortage because they'll be the first to go in a shortage. I assumed it was because the money made from helium baloons is responsible for higher rates of helium mining.

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.

The rate of radioactive decay, which is where subterranean Helium comes from.

The problem is probably in processing and storing the helium indefinitely. We might wish we had the vented helium in 100 years or whatever. But unless it can be retained until the time it is needed (a fundamentally unprofitable venture to anyone alive now), it can't be used.

> This is a plastic straw ban kind of issue, visible to people but pointless because the actual problem is elsewhere.

Curious, would you mind expanding on where you think the actual problem is?

if people are venting it away, it's because the people who would like to purchase it are not willing to pay the price.

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).

With a long term view we would be stockpiling way more, requiring more efforts to recover used helium, and capturing more instead of venting in natural gas wells rich in helium. All of those things cost more though and aren’t being done because helium is cheap.

To my recollection, plastic straws aren't anywhere near as prevalent or damaging in oceans as discarded fishing nets. That's the usual comparison here IIRC.

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.

https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

Suggests otherwise and is a fascinating read

The word "straw" do not appear in this article. The consumer plastic that is in the ocean is largely put there by large cities in Asia as the article points out. My plastic straws are going in to a landfill, not in to the ocean.

I know you’re talking about oceans, but I see straws in the grass by the side of the road, in the garden beds in the park etc. up until recently (in NZ) they were plastic straws. Now they’re paper, and they will biodegrade if no-one picks them up. That’s a win. I also haven’t seen a plastic shopping bag stuck in a tree for a few years (because they were also banned here). Another win.

Ocean plastics primarily come from cities in less developed countries that don’t have any government waste management (and by that i mean garbage pickup) that just dump their trash in the local river.

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.

The overwhelming majority of terrestrial plastic that makes it into the oceans originates from 10 rivers, all of them located in Asia and Africa. Plastic straws in the US generally get safely disposed of in landfills and never reach the ocean or other waterways.

Where does the plastic in the rivers come from?

The people that live near the rivers. Instead of landfills, dumps, or incineration, they just discard it directly in to the rivers or on to the street where it is washed in to rivers.

The problem is helium cannot be contained, and it goes up until it leaves the Earth. It never binds to any element that could "anchor" it to our planet.

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.

What's a ballpark-estimate volume/weight that might get vented?

Don't have exact figures but it's a lot less than zero.

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