The Increasing Scarcity of Helium | Hacker News Reader

The Increasing Scarcity of Helium

priceonomics.com

90 pointsdavidbarker83 comments

You can extract argon from air to do most of what helium is used for. It's completely inert and liquefies at 87K. Pure argon gas costs $5 a kilo. Liquid nitrogen and carbon dioxide will cover most of the rest of the applications and are much cheaper.

Neon from air is much more expensive at $300 a kilo. That's because Neon is at a low concentration similar to helium. Helium can be extracted for about the same price as neon, so we're not in danger of ever running out. Helium is a renewable resource that leaks out of the Earth's crust and regenerates from solar wind constantly, contrary to op.

It's only extremely cheap helium that will run out, and most of the supplies in the world are still underground in natural gas reserves. There are generations of cheap helium left.

No, it's not just that you "can" extract argon from the air, it's that we do, a lot. It's widely industrially available. If Argon were a suitable replacement for Helium it would be used instead due to its vastly lower cost, wider availability, and easier handling.

From this we can conclude that Argon is not a suitable replacement for the current uses of Helium. People pay a premium to use Helium today, and that speaks to the fact that Helium has unique properties that are highly advantageous.

He costs $3 per m^3 on the open market. Argon costs about $8 per m^3. N2 is cheaper.

There are some uses for He that are harder to replace. Argon will collect in low spaces more than He; N2 might be a compromise for welding. Nothing can be relied on to be quite as cold as liquid He. But there is a lot of substitution that can be done when He prices rise, several generations from now.

Should this be in price per kilo or price per mole? Argon is denser than helium.

One mole of gas at STP takes up 22.4 liters. He now trades at $10-20 a kilo, I think. Enjoy all the unit conversions you need.

Dude. 87K =/ 4K. 87K>77K. That means its worse than nitrogen, which is dirt cheap and fairly useless for serious cooling. Even run-of-the-mill superconductor magnet cooling is a stretch for nitrogen, let alone exploration and exploitation of more exotic quantum effects.

Quantum tech needs helium.

in 1996 Congress passed the Helium Privatization Act. The Act ordered the Reserve to sell off its stockpile, starting in 2005, at a formula-driven price -- not auctioned off at market rate, and to cease sales and shut down operations by 2015.

I'm a bit disappointed that Pricenomics didn't do some follow-up work to determine who sponsored this legislation, who that legislator's main political donors were, and which industrial concerns benefited the most from this implicit subsidy.

I have always found it interesting that helium leaves the planet when it escapes into the atmosphere. Something cool about letting some out of a balloon on the ground and knowing you have just launched something into space, to rise up and then get picked up by the solar wind and sent flying.

Romantic notions aside though, it is pretty common in space being the by product of the star's initial gas load. At some point I wonder if collecting it there will be economical.

The moon is chock full of it. Would be hysterical if we went back to the moon just because kid's balloons.

Nah, one MRI magnet uses more helium than 10,000 kids balloons, and you get to charge $5,000 every time you use it.

Uses or wastes? I.e. is 10k-balloon-equivalent helium released or reused?

Reused unless you do a quench (emergency shutdown)

This comment led me to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOUJP5dFEg

Apparently helium balloons use only about 8% of the annual consumption of helium, and that's just about the highest-margin use there is--hospitals effectively pay less for their helium because it's subsidized by kiddie balloons.

It is an entirely fanciful notion that the cost of helium would ever be high enough that going to the moon to retrieve it would be economically viable.

Long term, perhaps. With the right technology you could skim Helium out of the atmosphere of Jupiter or Saturn.

As long as natural gas continues to be extracted, there's likely to be sufficient Helium production from Earthly sources for the foreseeable future. It mostly just requires the right equipment on wells.

Sounds like it's time to found the Jupiter Mining Corporation...

Dispatch the small rouge one!

But is it real? I have a feeling "Peak Oil" and "Peak Helium" are not too far apart. Both were false projections based on poor understanding of market dynamics, technological advances, and proven and economically reachable reserves.

The article itself says the dumping of the last several years effectively destroyed the production infrastructure. As the price stabilizes reinvestment will follow, and doesn't it stand to reason that more reserves will be found and existing outlets more fully tapped such that 100 years reserve becomes 200 years and so on?

Sounds also a bit like the outcry over "rare earths" which after China threatened to shut off the spigot all of a sudden a dozen other facilities got in line to happily take their place. The market is lazy, up until the moment there's a buck to be made.

I think a lot of the discussion reads as more like "We have set ourselves up for a very rude awakening" rather than "we are about to run out of helium forever".

I'm completely unconvinced that peak oil is a false idea. We're down to extracting fossil fuels our of sand and rocks, this is crazy. We obviously passed peak in terms of the liquid crude that bubbles out of the ground.

Why is it crazy? We extract our iron, copper, gold, and silver from sand and rocks. Is that crazy too?

Because it's so inefficient relative to just pumping it out of oilfields, that it only makes sense when the price is quite high (hence the huge production pullback in response to recent price drops). Now I don't think we can just move off fossil fuels tomorrow, but we're clearly into an era of diminishing returns.

Extracting gold from rock is inefficient compared to panning for it in a river. That doesn't mean we are running out of gold.

IT doesn't but it does mean the days of anybody being able to prospect for gold are long gone. you'll always be able to get more of almost any physical resource, but the notion of Peak ____ is economic rather than purely physical.

We store huge lumps of gold in secure storage. We turn oil into dirty air. Gold doesn't get consumed when we use it.

Actually, total available gold is quite finite, as are resources of other minerals. I looked into this a few weeks ago.

All the gold mined in all human history amounts to about 175,000 metric tons, or 386 million pounds. And there's 7.3 billion of us humans.

That works out to about 24 grams of gold per person, or 0.84 standard ounces (0.77 troy ounces). At present rates of about $1,200 per ounce ($1,187.47 as I write this), it'd be worth slightly less than $1,000.

For copper, it's a kilo or two.

For numerous minerals and natural resources, remaining supplies range from a few years (antimony, 8), to a few decades (aluminium, 80 years).

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120618-global-resources-st...

Listed: antimony, indium, silver, copper, titanium, tantalum, phosphorus, aluminium, gas, oil, coal, agricultural land, coral reefs, rainforests.

Abundance!of!elements!in!Earth's!crust!is!pretty!interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

Humans (and other life forms) use free energy to redistribute mineral resources. We're frightfully good at it.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/5l_8MqtVwLLvX_DabPjY-g

As other said, it's crazy because we don't mine fossil fuels and then have them to use and keep and recycle. We go through this intense stuff just to burn it up and it's gone. Not so with those minerals and such you're talking about.

Fracking is fairly efficient at extraction from shale.

In the short-term, yes. But those wells decline in production drastically faster than traditional drilling.

There is a long and storied line of "We're running out of X! Oh my God!"

We have yet to run out of X.

Part of the problem is that when you extrapolate any sort of growth, you naturally run out of what's considered available resources. That's because nobody is looking for any more resources right now. Once the price goes up, folks start looking harder. As one wag put it: nothing you dig out of the ground has ever gone up in price consistently. Just the opposite.

I'm not saying we're never going to run out of $PRECIOUSTHING, just that "We're losing all the helium" is just another entry on a very long list of things. None of which worked out that way.

Fundamentally there is no chemical on Earth we could ever truly run out of, we could always endothermically synthesize anything in the worst case scenario.

Problem is that is insanely expensive. The more expensive resources are, the lower their utility to the market. We use helium and oil now to enable a lot of essential and hard to replace technologies, but if the price starts spiraling out of control due to diminishing availability (and it has / will in both cases) the increasing price limits your ability to use the resource for useful purposes.

Its not really about conservationism at all. Its long term strategic economic thinking. Doing stuff with non-renewable resources that is barely useful (fuel inefficient cars or party balloons) means when we want to do more useful things with these resources later, diminished availability might make it much more expensive later on.

I imagine to most people having plastics, MRI machines, and modern agriculture is more important than having to recharge an electric car or put an alternative heavier gas in their party balloons. If the price of these resources starts spiraling as the cheap supply runs out, the costs of the former skyrocket, and we do not have easy alternatives for them yet like we do a lot of modern oil and helium habits.

Off the top of my head, a few resources which have been exhausted:

⚫ Guano (fertilizer)

⚫ Forests, generally, in Lebanon ("the cedars of Lebanon"), Greece, Italy, Europe, England.

⚫ Whale oil.

⚫ Bison.

⚫ Passenger pigeons.

⚫ Dodo.

⚫ Arable land through the Middle East and Fertile Crescent.

⚫ Cod.

⚫ Water from the Aral Sea.

⚫ Cryolite (used in aluminium smelting).

The fact that several of these are species or ecosystem resources strikes me as significant.

Are you sure about forests in Europe?

Yes, in the sense that prior to the use of coal, forests were being used unsustainably and, frequently, exhausted.

At the time of the American Revolution, England relied on its American colonies for lumber, fuelwood, turpentine (derived from pine pitch), and other forestry products. It wasn't able to provision its own ships let alone fuel supplies, absent these.

Forests have recovered in Europe over the past 100-150 years, but that's almost entirely due to offloading fuel supplies to coal, oil, and gas.

Among the problems prompted by Greece's credit crisis is a renewal of woodburning, creating both air quality problems and deforestation:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/greece-financial-crisis-high-fue...

In the US, quality lumber is becoming difficult to find:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/comments/389q25/lumber...

Thank you.

I was referring specifically to elements found naturally on the Earth, but my wording was unclear. By pointing out a bunch of other things that I was not referring to, you have helped clarify the issue.

Don't really want to do a rebuttal. I did learn some things about cryolite this morning. Here's a good article for those looking to dig deeper. (apologies for the pun)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

To date, relatively few actual _mineral_ resources have been exhaustd. Cryolite was also a bit of a surprise for me, though I think I've run across mention of it before.

The more general trend, that it's been ecosystem resources, especially animal and plant extinctions, sometimes localized, which are more comonly encountered, suggests the risks we're facing are more likely systemic than strictly one of stocks.

I disagree with the general suggestion of your Slate reference that resource consumption is no longer a concern. Though economists specifically are rather divorced from reality.

The rare earths comparison is probably more apt than the peak-oil one, but yeah. 100 years reserves is more than we have of all sorts of things and represents a non-scarce resource.

Peak conventional oil was reached in 2005. World production of liquid oil is already steadily falling and will never again reach its peak. Synthetic and deep water and rock and tar to oil conversion processes have kept total world production steady since then and refinery efficiencies have been stepped up to produce more motor fuel, but increasingly expensive and heroic extraction is necessary to keep all that up. Prices have been rising and will continue to rise. The lower prices this year are unsustainable as they are now below marginal cost of production.

And peak helium is linked tightly to peak natural gas, because that's how helium is obtained. It's a byproduct of natural gas. When natural gas production falls in the next few decades, He will do the same.

Of course, we can always extract He from the atmosphere. Unlike oil, it renews itself -- contrary to op's implication -- from underground radiation and solar wind. it won't ever get much more expensive than neon.

The relentless fall in U.S. labor force participation will continue to cause reduced economy activity, which can explain why the price of oil was quite constant from 2010-2014:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

As an active scuba diver I feel sort of guilty about wasting a non-renewable resource by breathing helium through open-circuit equipment on deep dives. And the USA retail price that divers pay for helium has roughly tripled in the past 15 years. Fairly soon I'm afraid we're going to have to either quit diving deeper than 30m, or switch to more complex, expensive, and dangerous closed-circuit rebreathers.

Sounds like an opportunity to develop simpler, cheaper, more reliable closed-circuit technology, no?

Or is there something fundamental about the paradigm that makes that impossible?

Closed-circuit rebreather technology is already about as simple as it can get, but there is a fundamental minimum complexity that will always be higher than open-circuit. You will always need multiple O₂ sensors (for redundancy), probably a CO₂ sensor, control electronics, batteries, solenoids, scrubber, readouts, etc. Those items are usually quite reliable but they still introduce additional failure points and risk of operator error.

What do you think about the possibility of using hydrogen as a buffer gas (is that the right term? I haven't looked into this stuff in a good long time...). H/O mixtures are only explosive over a fairly narrow range, so it should be perfectly safe to breathe once the total pressure (And thus hydrogen fraction) are high enough, and I know I've seen it proposed in science fiction, but I'd be interested to know what an actual diver thinks about it.

Commercial diving operations have used hydrogen mixes on an experimental basis for extremely deep dives. This was done mainly to reduce the work of breathing, not to save helium. At extreme depths of like 400m even helium gas gets thick and hard to breathe, whereas hydrogen is a little less dense. Nowadays most work at 400m+ is done by ROVs instead of human divers due to cost and safety.

For sport diving in the 30 – 120m range using hydrogen mixes would be ridiculously dangerous due to the fire risk. What happens if your tank leaks on the dive boat next to an engine? No sane dive shop owner or boat captain would ever allow it.

> What happens if your tank leaks on the dive boat next to an engine?

Nothing much would happen, the hydrogen would rapidly rise up and away.

You'd have a hard time intentionally causing a fire with a low level leak of hydrogen near a closed fire like an engine, never mind by accident.

A small amount of safety precaution (and diving is quite full of safety precautions, so I think they could handle it) is all you would need to make it safe.

You're kidding right? I tell you what, how about you mix up a tank of 18% O₂ / 45% H / 37% N₂ pressurized to 230bar. Then open the tank valve next to an old outboard motor or a deckhand smoking a cigarette.

Sport diving with flammable mixes is something that only works in hacker fantasy land, not the real world.

Smoking would be bad because the fire would be amongst the tanks, but you'd have to open it almost on top of the motor to cause a fire that way, because the fire in contained, and the hot part (the exhaust) is under water. Plus the motor is not located where the people/supplies are.

So simply don't carry the tank over to the motor and open it there, and don't smoke. Even the most basic of safety practice would make this not a problem.

Do you not carry any fuel onboard? Hydrogen is safer than gasoline, yet people carry it without a second thought.

Well, you should probably put more blame on the corrupt lawmakers who decided to give away Helium reserves beneath market price.

Progress is being made:

"2013 saw the passage of the Helium Stewardship Act, which allowed the National Helium Reserve to continue operations until 2021, and to sell its helium at auction -- creating prices closer to market rate. But not before selling off a large chunk of the Reserve for peanuts."

We have a strategic petroleum reserve that most Congress and America would go berserk over if we attempted to close, but helium, something far more valuable, is filling our party favors.

I've refused to buy helium party balloons for decades now because of this.

How old are you, and when did you first hear about the scarcity of helium?

I'm not sure what you're implying by asking, but I'm 33 and I remember hearing about this probably about 10 years ago.

They don't fill them with pure helium anymore, just a very small amount and the rest air. They stop floating even when by appearance they are still full.

"China also plans on mining helium-3, which is currently mostly manufactured, off the moon." add this to the list of why getting our butts into space remains a vital goal (someone is keeping this list, yes?)

I think this was a central plot element in Iron Sky

Right. He3 fusion is harder to do than DT-DT fusion, which we can't yet make work for power production anyway. DT-DT fusion produces somewhat more radioactive waste products, but less than fission.

It's possible, after all, to make He3 by making tritium and waiting 12 years.

The price of helium in bulk went way up two years ago. Airship Ventures, Silicon Valley's tourist Zeppelin NT, had to shut down and sell their ship.

According to wikipedia, they closed up due to lack of a long term sponsor. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airship_Ventures

It's more like the helium shortage made the existing operation unprofitable, and they needed to increase revenue to stay in operation. Also, during the recession, $400 sightseeing trips didn't sell well.

Airships leak helium. A lot. You can't just inflate the thing once; it needs constant refilling. I met the CEO once at a steampunk convention, before the shutdown. The price of helium was starting to hurt, but hadn't killed them yet. Their two biggest expenses were labor and helium. Fuel cost was relatively small.

There's tons of it right there on the sun. Just vacuum it up, and problem solved.

Yeah. Best to do it at night!

Should be lesser of a problem once we get further along with fusion.

okay, how do you figure?

EDIT: I thought you meant there was some wasteful high-energy way to get it from something, the way you can do electrolysis on water (to get oxygen and hydrogen, though this isn't used due to it being easier to just get hydrogen from fossil fuels.) I didn't think you meant we should literally fuse hydrogen to meet our helium needs!

H + H = He, trivial

IIRC, the volume of production wouldn't nearly meet the current market demand.

"Lesser" is a relative term. My hope is that we replace hydrocarbons quite thoroughly with fusion if/when the tech becomes viable; which probably won't solve the problem but will certainly help.

We'll basically have the same situation as we have with plutonium once the terrestrial/natural resources die out - which is bad but not nearly as impossible as simply not having access to the element.

I'm not sure what your point is.

Even if we replaced all energy generation with fusion. And I mean all of it. As far as I'm aware, the amount of waste helium produced wouldn't meet our needs.

Maybe you don't realize just how much industrial helium is used... but it's a lot. According to:

http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/mcs-...

As of 2013, some 47 million cubic meters, or 1.8 billion cubic feet, to be exact.

Every MRI uses Helium, as do many other systems, for cryogenics. It's also used in applications where an inert environment is required, which includes arc welding applications (think all those aluminum trucks rolling off assembly lines).

Again, "lesser" is relative.

"Some" is more than "none" by a significant margin. A single functioning MRI is significantly more than no functioning MRIs.

> I'm aware, the amount of waste helium produced wouldn't meet our needs.

Yes, the energy produced by nuclear power is huge - which means you don't need to convert much mass and hence you don't wind up with much He.

Something is infinitely better than nothing. Again, take Pu as an example of that - we have very little of the stuff but we are careful with it because of the scarcity (something that we are not with He); if we were forced to we could probably stretch a limited He supply a bit further, just like we do with Pu (e.g. not using it for bloody balloons). He is a great cryogenic for MRIs but possibly it's not the only feasible solution to that specific problem: it might be possible to replace it with a more common element.

> Something is infinitely better than nothing.

Eh, honestly, that's a largely meaningless statement.

Let's say we went from 40 million cubic meters of helium a day to 1.

That would effectively eliminate the vast majority of industrial helium applications due to cost.

So no, "something" isn't better than "nothing" if you go from "abundant" to "very scarce".

And yes, there are absolutely applications (such as welding) where there are alternatives available (argon and xenon, particularly). But that isn't solving the helium shortage problem. It's coping with it. Which we should be doing. But we can't expect fusion to help us along... it's not an answer, here.

I think zamalek is making a point about marginal value - kinda. The vast majority of helium users are screwed. they've just got to figure out something else. But some users, say MRI machine makers, really need it. And people want MRIs. So, they'll mark up the cost of their machines by a million dollars (or whatever). Really, if there's demand at thousands of dollars per cubic meter, we'll find a way.

my guess is harvesting from the moon, rather than fusion. We might also just say fuck it, reserve the last million cubic feet for science experiments and call it a day.

I think your point is, there are tons of industrial uses of helium right now, and if it were to be gone today, it would be a huge problem.

imho, we should probably tax the hell out of its usage right now to force people find alternatives and be more efficient.

The price change is coming even if we don't want it to. it can be gradual or a hockey stick. We both agree cutting the supply by 7 or 8 orders of magnitude one afternoon would really suck.

Most (all?) cryogenic systems can be closed circuit. The only reason they don't is because He is cheap.

Actually 4*H = He4. Or D + D = He4, etc.

I ran the math on that once: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2922

Spoiler: No.

Helium is the waste product of every serious contender for a power-producing fusion reaction.

One of the great things about fusion is that it requires so little fuel to produce huge amounts of energy, though, and correspondingly would produce very little helium waste. So, probably not gonna be all that practical for propping up the commercial helium supply.

Production of He-3 is actually a major concern in the nuclear industry. It's pretty much the best medium to make a neutron detector out of because it has an enormous probability to capture a neutron. Neutron detectors are rather important for many reasons, but mostly because they're the best way to detect nuclear weapons.

He-3 is rather rare naturally and was only really produced in quantity as a byproduct of nuclear weapons fabrication. Basically nobody is making nuclear weapons these days (at least in significant quantities) and there's not really any viable source of He-3. Alternative detector media like BF3 is crappy by comparison and the only other way to make He-3 en masse is via fusion, which isn't yet feasible.

So nowadays a tube full of He-3 about the size of a typical fluorescent light can run into the $100000 range (ish, it's so rare that it isn't really sold by anybody).

It's a good (perhaps the only good) reason to go back to the moon. There's tons of that stuff there.

Well, honestly it's hard to imagine any situation where it would be economically viable to extract He-3 from lunar regolith and bring it back to Earth any time soon and that's ignoring the fact that we still can't yet build a fusion reactor to burn it in. D-T fusion will be more practical for a long time because we can breed the fuel pretty easily by sticking lithium in a fission reactor. That same breeding reaction is the one that ultimately produces He-3 since the tritium decays into He-3, but it's way faster/easier to just use the tritium instead of waiting around for it to decay. Helium fusion also has most of the same materials issues as D-T fusion and a higher ignition temperature, so really it's not particularly ideal.

Outside of fuel for fusion, radiation detectors and a few other minor applications there's not much use for He-3. The more interesting possibility to me is the idea of extracting He-3 on the moon and keeping it there, using it to fuel a fusion reactor powering some sort of sci-fi type lunar city/port. Since it's available in relative abundance on the moon directly and doesn't have to be bred indirectly it starts to make sense as a fuel.

Even if the entire world were using the same amount of energy per capita as the United States, and all of that was supplied via fusion reactors, the Helium produced by those reactors would be significantly lower than current levels of Helium usage.

Should revisit using hydrogen as a lifting gas. Yes, I know, "Hindenburg", but we've learned how to fly safely in airplanes full of fuel.

> At the current consumption rates, Richardson estimated we would deplete the world’s helium reserves within 100 years.

Only 100 years, how scary. I think by then we'll find new ways to get helium, find alternatives or recycle it. A lot happens in 100 years.

And this, basically, is how we get all sorts of environmental/resource collapse. "Bah, I'll be dead before it gets bad, so who cares? I'm sure my grandkids will come up with something, probably. They'll be fine."

There's plenty of helium in natural gas, but it isn't being separated because the current price of helium is artificially low because of government manipulation (subsidies probably isn't the right way to describe it)

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