Global helium shortage in prospect as US reservoir in line to close next month
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
http://www.metafilter.com/94959/We-Are-Running-Out-Of-Helium...
The Helium Privatisation Act required the reserve to sell enough helium to pay off its debts by a given deadline, then close. The resulting glut has kept the price low.
http://phys.org/news201853523.html
I don't know why they didn't instead just sell the reserve in its entirety for the amount of the debt, or for more. If the goal was to get the government out of the helium business (a dubious aim, if it's really as strategic an asset as all that) that would have done the job immediately and eliminated years of market distortion. But I guess any upheaval that resulted would be easily tied to the government officials who were around at the time.
Helium is a byproduct of natural gas production ... Demand for helium has risen, driven particularly by Asia's booming manufacturing industry.
A cynic might wonder if a closing date known 19 years in advance was designed partly to ensure that American petrochemical industry had time to develop the infrastructure required to take maximum advantage of any price shock.
Also, if helium is the most abundant element in the universe, is there a practical, economical way to harvest this from space; I'm envisioning some sort of solar-sail powered scoop sucking up helium for return to earth in a heat-shielded flask parachuted into the oceans.
Helium is a product of Hydrogen that has undergone fusion. We'll be able to manufacture Helium when Nuclear Fusion becomes a reality on Earth.
A fusion reaction that starts from 4 hydrogen atoms (with no neutrons) produces one atom of helium. Let's just ignore the fact that this is a very hard reaction to do, even by fusion standards, and let's just ignore how the energy comes out and deal with raw amounts. Let's produce 1 mole of helium, which according to Wolfram Alpha, is .025 cubic meters of helium at standard temperature and pressure [1].
To produce that mole of helium, we need 4 moles of hydrogen. According to Wikipedia [2], 4 atoms of hydrogen combine to produce 26.7 MeV of energy. So the production of that 0.025 cubic meters of helium produces 26.7 MeV times Avogadro's Number of energy, which Google [3] conveniently converts to Joules for us without asking: 2.6 × 10e12 joules.
Wikipedia [4] says annual hydrogen consumption was 15 million kilograms per year in 2000. Let's roll with that, because whynot. Helium's atomic mass is 4.003, let's just call it 4, so the number we just ran in Joules was for 4 grams. So we have to multiple that Joule count by 3,750,000,000, yielding 9.75 × 10e22Joules of excess energy to produce the world's helium use for 2000. Human energy consumption in 2000 (because why not stay consistent) was 117.687 petawatthours, which is 4.23 × 10e20 joules.
So, to produce the amount of helium we used in 2000, if I've got all my numbers correct (and it's been a while, but the tools I'm using here handle units automatically so that's a plus for my chances of being right), would produce as a byproduct approximately ~230 times the amount of energy humans consumed in that year.
That's actually enough energy to be a serious problem, even before we discuss the fact that it comes out as positrons and gamma rays. (And neutrinos, but that's not a problem.)
In conclusion, we are not about to start producing helium from fusion, even if we could.
[1]: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+1+mole+of+hel...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star#Nuclear_fusion_reaction_pa...
[3]: https://www.google.com/search?q=26.7+MeV+times+Avogadro's+nu...
I thought that was the whole goal of cold fusion research?
Problem SOLVED!
Also, i can't imagine not letting kids play with something lighter than air. Helium balloons should be considered mandatory educational supplies for small children.
But you're right it makes little sense in terms of buoyancy and that hadn't occurred to me at the time. Maybe it was actually a switch to a helium/nitrogen blend.
I can also see replacing helium completely for those balloons that get tied into shapes (animals etc), but that's a tiny sliver of the balloon market I'd assume.
And, hey, why not just use air?
I've always considered the false safety issues with hydrogen and the fact you can instead use, safer but expensive helium have held it back.
No facts of figures to support my reasoning though.
Something lay people (And children in many states) handle all the time and sit on top a huge tank of every time they go driving.
Just saying hydrogen dangers are way over rated and it's hurt progress, and part of that is because there is a safer replacement, even though it's very expensive.
There are good reasons we don't use hydrogen anymore in airships and use helium instead. There are other good reasons not to use helium, but those reasons don't trump the dangers of hydrogen, unless you knew of specific development which would mitigate the dangers that pressurized hydrogen gas presents, which I'm guessing you do not.
It sounds like the facility in Texas would shut down due to lack of funding, not a lack of material? If that is the case, the helium at the facility doesn't magically disappear overnight. Though it may slowly leak...
Of course, it seems to me like the right action would be to try to increase the market price. It is clearly more valuable than its current price, and the US reserve was providing more than half the world's helium for a while.
Still way cheaper than printer ink, at over $5,000 per litre!
http://science.time.com/2013/09/05/americas-oil-boom-wont-ma...
We like helium because it doesn't react with anything. That also means we can't easily extract it from anything--you have to extract everything else until only helium remains. This is a ridiculously expensive process.
The large underground domes that trapped natural gas in Texas also trapped the helium that resulted from millennia of radioactive decay within the Earth. Getting helium from that sort of a deposit is comparatively inexpensive.
In the early 20st century, we believed helium airships were going to become important military weapons, and we started to stock pile helium as a strategic reserve--Texas natural gas producers were mandated to extract the helium and give it to the government for storage and eventual military use rather than vent it into the atmosphere.
Later we got airplanes, and airships became a thing of the past like dodos. And since we had a large store of helium, it was available for research and science and balloons. Cool things developed. For MR this meant high-fields generated by superconducting magnets.
But of course maintaining a large stockpile of helium is also expensive. And what does the public know about helium? Why are we wasting our money on balloons and funny voices and besides if scientists say it's important, then it must be the devil's plaything.
So along came the Gingrich-era House and the Contract with America. Congress stopped the economically-crushing over-bearing regulatory burden of helium trapping that was crushing Texas's natural gas competitiveness.
Congress also decided to simultaneously make a few bucks by selling of the helium reserve at cut rate prices, killing any chance of economic incentives developing a secondary market for helium. You can't simultaneously cut funding for science and jack up the prices of helium, that would be one straw too far! Thus the large US reserve was to be sold off at very low prices.
Texas natural gas producers thereby had little incentive to catch the helium themselves as they plowed through the easy natural gas supply, so it was vented. And the Texas dome natural gas was extremely easy to mine, so production skyrocketed after being freed from the shackles of government regulations.
Now that we've moved through the domed natural gas, we're going after the harder to reach natural gas via fracking.
In all honest did not know about the history behind all that. Thanks for sharing.
Secondly, allowing the market price of helium to shoot up for foolish bureaucratic reasons is short-sighted, selfish, and doesn't really do anyone any good.