There is a market shortage of helium but shouldn't be:
There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas.
TIL Helium kills Kudzu and powers fusion power plants.
There's also helium in methane, but unfortunately few places crack out the helium from natural gas.
TIL Helium kills Kudzu and powers fusion power plants.
1. What is the total theoretical resource?
2. How much of it do we actually now the location of
3. How much is technically recoverable?
4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable?
The last one is really the crux of the problem nowadays, there is a lot of helium but most of it just isn't in a high enough quantity to make the investment to built processing for it. Thus most of it just float off into space.
There will come a point when the price hits high enough to justify the cost but that also means higher costs to the end user.
But literally the least important factor beyond “should we have started yesterday”. The amount of waste humanity has perpetuated in just the last 100 years because something wasn’t “economically viable” this fiscal quarter makes my head hurt.
Apropos of nothing, see one trillion dollars into datacenters.
Just because something isn’t economically viable today doesn’t mean it never will be. That short term thinking is exactly why China is absolutely decimating the US in renewable energy.
So the oil should be economically unviable but due to poor regulation, they were able to extract it.
We make decisions based on objective reality, not a perfect theory in a lab.
This makes me wonder if it'd be worthwhile starting a company to capture it now, and just stockpile it until it's rare enough to be able to use my stockpile to control the price. The DeBeers diamonds playbook applied to helium, or maybe the Peter Thiel build-a-monopoly-to-win approach.
If the government fines individuals for not digging holes in their back garden every day then suddenly it's economically viable to dig holes in your back garden every day, but it doesn't mean it's overall productive.
It's also already economical to make Hydrogen and Carbon-based products like Graphene and spec Oxidized Carbon Nanotubes from natural gas.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946629
And, it's surely also profitable to make more He3, He4, and T with a fusion reactor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946533
But do our communities want fracking wastewater in our aquifer groundwater or on our farm fields?
When is the break-even point for cracking Helium from natural gas at current and predicted Helium market prices?
turquoise hydrogen: high-temp pyrolysis of methane
So e.g. [1] is turquoise hydrogen.
[1] "Production of hydrogen and carbon nanotubes from methane using a multi-pass floating catalyst chemical vapour deposition reactor with process gas recycling" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-025-01925-3
A renewable feedstock process that yields Hydrogen and O-CNT would be yielding teal hydrogen.
A natural gas process that yields Hydrogen and O-CNT would be yielding turquoise hydrogen.
First the bad: Helium is very expensive to extract and store. You'd need a lot of venture capital. And you'd have a tough time competing with Qatar which produces between 1/4 and 1/3 of the world's supply. Qatar already is the DeBeers of helium.
The good: When the US/Iran war started helium prices shot up, so there might be an opportunity for a helium supplier not dependent on the Strait of Hormuz.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/helium-prices-soar-q...
That right there is reason enough to try to synthesize it in massive quantities.
A Deuterated Vitrimer pipe with Li-6, B-10, and B-11 could be recycled to extract the T, 3He, and 4He.
Deuterated Vitrimers could also be disposed of in a waste burner.