We Discovered Helium 150 Years Ago. Are We Running Out?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/08/news-helium-mri-superconducting-markets-reserve-technology/

by lxm • 8 years ago

130 136 8 years ago

lend000• 8 years ago

I was unable to find the actual breakdown of helium consumption by application, but I assume party balloons are pretty high on the list. Most of the other commercial uses (such as in medicine, welding, diving, etc.) tend to use smaller amounts of helium and do not lose the helium after one usage. This seems like a great example of something where market prices will sort make helium balloons obsolete before helium starts to become too cost prohibitive for its more 'important' uses.

watwut• 8 years ago

Market prices will not solve helium, because helium price is kept artificially cheap via some subsidies.

klipt• 8 years ago

Is there a market for helium futures?

jandrese• 8 years ago

I think it is the opposite. Party balloons are a relatively small consumer of helium.

https://geology.com/articles/helium/uses-of-helium.gif

It is lumped into the "other" category on this chart.

One of the problems is that our helium supply comes as a byproduct of the oil and gas industry so as we switch to renewable energy sources the yearly supply will diminish even as demand increases.

So party balloons may become unaffordable but that won't affect the total demand very much. Or maybe we'll have far more exciting party balloons filled with hydrogen gas instead.

hx2a• 8 years ago

far more exciting party balloons filled with hydrogen gas instead.

Far more exciting, of course, because the balloons will explode. My kind of party!

throwaway57522• 8 years ago

"One of the problems is that our helium supply comes as a byproduct of the oil and gas industry so as we switch to renewable energy sources the yearly supply will diminish even as demand increases."

Unlikely. It is not a byproduct of the oil industry. It is very specifically a byproduct of the gas industry. NG is the least carbon intensive fossil fuel so it's likely to lag. Further, you can separate and reinject.

xoa• 8 years ago

One question that chart brings to mind though is what is the loss/recapture/reuse rate for those various uses? Many clearly involve atmospheric venting so they're just a loss, but I'd imagine cryogenics at least must often have at least the potential for reuse of parts of it.

Party balloons are a 100% loss though, so even if they're only a lesser fraction of that 13% "Other" category (7%? 4%?) every bit that goes there ends up vented so I could see that adding up over time vs others.

Ideally proper pricing would help take care of this but that's pretty hard for something like helium.

bwann• 8 years ago

Helium is also used in liquid fueled rockets to pressurize tanks and some pneumatics. I can't image how much we sent to space in the Apollo era alone.

GW1509142• 8 years ago

This story seems to resurface every few months, and the answer to the question of whether or not we’re running out of the second most common element in the known universe is still “No.” It is true that most helium is the byproduct of natural gas production, and demand for Helium is rising while (hopefully) demand for fossil fuels will dwindle. It is also true that Helium may become more expensive if we keep wasting it on party balloons. That is not the same as “running out” however, and we’re not running out of it.

Maybe someday the media can honestly reflect reality in this case with a headline that talks about being less wasteful of a valuable resource so that it doesn’t become painfully expensive, rather than framing in terms of actual scarcity on Earth. It’s also one of those areas where the market can probably handle this because few people will be willing to pay big bucks for a single party balloon. Given that balloons are harmful to the environment to begin with, letting that tradition naturally die off seems like a win-win.

Edit: As another poster has pointed out, natural gas subsidies are a problem, which artificially depress the price of Helium. That is still not “running out” though.

adrianN3• 8 years ago

Helium might be the second most abundant element in the universe, but that doesn't say much about the abundance here on Earth and how much of that can be feasibly extracted.

throwaway57522• 8 years ago

"second most common element in the known universe "

How about here on Earth? Since it doesn't chemically bond to other elements, the gas form escapes the atmosphere and is blown away by solar wind, effectively lost forever. All that we have is the byproduct of nuclear fission that is prevented from reaching the atmosphere by stratigraphic trap. It has that reservoir characteristic in common with natural gas, but as we know Carbon is much more reactive and goes through the carbon cycle. We could run out of Helium in any practical sense.

gameswithgo• 8 years ago

You seem to be getting very upset over the phrase "running out" vs "painfully expensive" when the former can easily, and often is, interpreted as the latter, and articles which talk about a resource "running out" usually describe what they mean by that, therein.

I too tend toward pedantry but I try to stop myself and say "I can be technically correct all the time or I can be sane"

Wistar• 8 years ago

Isaac Asimov wrote about carelessness with helium in his 1977 essay "The Vanishing Element," published in American Airlines on-board magazine "The American Way." I can't find a copy of it online but I did read it at the time.

dfggdfsfsdfs2• 8 years ago

"second most common element in the known universe"

Yeah, but its impossible to harvest He in space (Collect the sun's plasma? Land on Mars, and drill there? A big He collecting sail?)

noonespecial• 8 years ago

Helium may become more expensive if we keep wasting it on party balloons.

Not to nitpick, but only a tiny fraction of all helium use is "wasted on party balloons". Most is used for cryo-cooling applications. Heck, we use more helium by far scuba-diving than on party balloons.

GW1509142• 8 years ago

All helium that goes into a balloon is wasted, never to be recovered. In scientific applications it is typically recycled. I don’t know about SCUBA, but I’d venture to say that it’s a necessity for deep dives whereas in a balloon it’s a novelty.

ska2• 8 years ago

    running out of the second most common element in the known universe is still "No."

That's a disingenuous way of framing it. The universe clearly isn't in any danger of running out of helium, but nobody is talking about that because it isn't relevant to what it costs us to collect it on earth.

siruncledrew• 8 years ago

If helium is “running out” then shouldn’t we have some sort of embargo on wasted helium uses like balloons? Or are consumer product uses of helium not a significant dent in the supply?

savanaly• 8 years ago

Can we not let the market sort it out? If we don't interfere in the free trade of helium and plausibly commit to never do so, the current price will always be the best estimate of the future price that we have, discounted by the expected interest rate. And thus if we are going to be running out and that is going to cause a shortage, the price will go up now and incentivize conservation.

epicureanideal• 8 years ago

Markets aren't perfect in situations like this.

js84• 8 years ago

Markets cannot incentivize conservation. They are designed to maximally use all available resources. In most cases it's a good thing, but in few cases it is catastrophic. (Think about it - the more is the resource being conserved, the more relatively abundant it becomes, and the cheaper it becomes in the market. The conservation of resource can only be done if it's use and extraction is punished, and free market only gives positive incentives.)

(That's why the markets cannot solve global warming for example, and that's why free market fundamentalists are often unable to believe that global warming is happening.)

HarryHirsch2• 8 years ago

We did that when Bill Clinton ordered that the National Helium Reserve be sold off. The "Helium Privatization Act", as it was called, was disastrous. The price dropped precipitiously, and in turn every third-tier college bought their high-field NMR. A boon for Bruker and Varian, less so for science.

maxerickson• 8 years ago

Nothing wrong with banning flying litter though.

vkou4• 8 years ago

We let the market sort out whale oil. Whale oil was cheap for a long time, followed by modest price increases, followed by complete collapse of the world's whaling fleets, after which point you could not get it for any amount of money.

The current price is not the best estimate of the future rate. It is distorted by people selling below it's true cost (typically, to pay off sunk costs, or to keep the lights on in their business.)

saagarjha6• 8 years ago

IIRC the government injected a bunch of subsidized helium into the market recently. So it’s not really a free market.

specialp• 8 years ago

The reason why helium is "running out" is it is being treated as a cheap commodity which it is and was. Many experiments and machines would rather top off boiling away helium rather than recapture and recompress it in an expensive closed loop refrigeration unit. So yes dirt cheap helium being wasted will run out one day, but as the prices increase conservation will increase, and natural gas producers will find it more economical to invest in capturing it rather than letting it escape.

parrellel• 8 years ago

In the mid 90's idiots decided to eliminate the US strategic helium reserve, flooding the market, which explains things like helium balloons. Eventually, the stockpile will be entirely drawn down, and, costs will go up. That is what "running out" means in this case.

The reserve itself was filled from a series of government subsidized natural gas plants, so, it's possible to create a new giant bubble under some unused chunk of the southwest if it was required.

ISL2• 8 years ago

Helium balloons were common and inexpensive prior to 1996 [1].

Even today, when helium prices are high, the cost of helium is not prohibitive for consumer balloons.

[1] Source: Was alive and attended birthday parties.

akshayB• 8 years ago

Naturally Helium is produced due to radio active decay of radio active elements but all nuclear reactors also produce Helium as a by product which can be captured (worse case most expensive scenario). I am also bit confused by the fact that Helium is so cheap and easy to buy, why haven't the price sky rocketed yet. You easily order a decent size tank of Helium for $50 online.

mchannon• 8 years ago

Haven't been able to verify your claim "all nuclear reactors also produce Helium as a by product". While Helium manufacture is a given for about all forms of fusion (if fusion ever takes off we'll barely be able to supply our party balloon demand since there's so little material needed for fusion).

Fission (as one would find in a nuclear power reactor) does not appear to generate helium. Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 appear to be the major products, the former eventually turning into Barium-137 (no alpha decay), and the latter eventually to Zirconium-90 (no alpha decay).

yorwba• 8 years ago

Poking around on Wikipedia, it appears that fission and its byproducts indeed do not generate alpha particles, but the enriched uranium and plutonium also undergo alpha decay, so simply collecting lots of fissile material in one place should produce a noticeable amount of helium.

scythe• 8 years ago

I thought we recently discovered a huge amount of helium in East Africa:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/28/huge-helium-...

woliveirajr• 8 years ago

Sometimes this discussion arises, and as I remember it, there are two kind of "Helium" that should be discussed.

The first case is the common helium, used to fill up baloons and so on. It is mixed with many others gases, it is common, the price is very low, and despite being used to many things, it isn't running out, supplies aren't getting empty.

The second case is the "helium" as a pure gas, composed by helium and nothing else (except for traces of other gases). This is rare, this is expansive, this is hard to get (and it costs a lot to extract pure helium from the atmosphere). This is the helium that we are "running out", despite being able to extract it from sources, as the price might and will increase.

nradov7• 8 years ago

No there's really only one kind of helium, with varying levels of purity. Even balloon helium is usually almost 100% pure. Helium is never extracted from the air; there isn't enough of it there to be practical. We get it as a byproduct of natural gas extraction.

saagarjha6• 8 years ago

Isn’t balloon helium mixed with oxygen so that children don’t suffocate inhaling it?

ars• 8 years ago

Even balloon helium is usually almost 100% pure

Are you sure? I ask, because latex helium filled balloons slowly lose air as the helium leaks out - but after some time they stop, and stay a fixed size.

But they don't float when they reach that point!

If it were pure helium, wouldn't a: all the helium leak out, and b: still float if for whatever reason the helium did not leak?

Personally I suspect helium balloons have just enough helium to float when full and the rest is regular air.

Jun8• 8 years ago

Good summary. For those who want to learn more, here's a more in-depth reply to the "Are running out of Helium?" questions. I'll just quote the definition that he uses, which in itself sheds light to teh matter:

"a mineral reserve is that amount of some mineral that we have identified the location of, weighed, measured, tested the extraction of and proven (and the proof is the extremely important part here) that we can, with current technology, and at current prices, make a profit by extracting it."

Perhaps a loose analogy would be with TAM/SAM/SOM.

physicsyogi• 8 years ago

There's also the isotope Helium-3, which is far more scarce than Helium-4 and is rapidly running out. It's used to detect radiation and to reach ultralow temperatures in low-temperature physics research and medical cryogenics. It's scarcity has been a national security concern.

InclinedPlane3• 8 years ago

This is almost entirely incorrect. Helium is generally not extracted from the atmosphere, it comes as a byproduct of mining natural gas (the same conditions that trap natural gas underground also traps noble gases produced by radioactive decay, Helium (being just a neutralized alpha particle) is a very common product of such decay and so abundant in natural gas deposits, but it requires special equipment to trap it). Historically the US has excelled at Helium production due to its natural gas infrastructure, and it has created a national strategic Helium reserve to maintain stocks of the gas just in case. However, the government has decided to sell of much of that reserve in recent years, lowering the price of Helium to artificial levels and destroying the natural economic incentives that would exist to produce and conserve Helium.

ww520• 8 years ago

Could the helium shortage spurt a race to mining on the Moon?

ben_w• 8 years ago

Unlikely. Even if it was easy and convenient to mine and transport as moonrocks (it isn’t) the helium would have to be more expensive than gold to be worth the cost.

war1025• 8 years ago

An interesting thing I learned a few years ago, don't remember where exactly, is that when people say things like, "We only have x years of material y left", what they are actually saying is that the known sources of that material will last for the next `y` years.

There is almost always another way to get the raw materials, it just doesn't currently make sense to look for them because there are existing sources that are already available and meeting demand.

adrianN3• 8 years ago

We know how to make Helium using fusion, so we'll never "run out". However we'll definitely run out of Helium that is cheap enough to fill your hard disk with.

nradov7• 8 years ago

As a scuba diver I often use >2000 liters of helium on a single open circuit deep dive. I feel kind of bad about wasting a (mostly) non-renewable resource but with rebreathers still being expensive and dangerous there isn't any good alternative.

benzofuran2• 8 years ago

You’re doing high percentage trimix deco dives and still see rebreathers as dangerous?

nradov7• 8 years ago

Yes there's a lot more that can go wrong with rebreathers. Open circuit is much more forgiving. As long as you can breathe you can stay alive. No single mistake will kill you and there are multiple opportunities to fix any problem. Whereas with a closed circuit rebreather there are failure modes which are essentially "silent" (or at least easy to overlook in a stressful situation) that can kill you quickly. Most rebreather deaths involve some sort of diver error, but I don't trust myself to be perfect every time.

wallstquant• 8 years ago

If we ever get fusion it should produce he as a byproduct. So dive away and pray for fusion to come someday.

cm2187• 8 years ago

Another interesting market is the isotope helium 3 [1], which has various medical applications, and which only industrial source is the natural decay of radioactive material in nuclear weapons, which need to be "purged" regularly to collect the helium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3

philipkglass3• 8 years ago

The atmospheric noble gas concentrations, in ppmv:

Helium 5.24

Neon 18.18

Krypton 1.14

Argon 9340

Xenon 0.087

http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/Fundamentals/AtmosphereComp...

Krypton is rarer in the atmosphere than helium (by molar/volume concentration), though more abundant by mass. Krypton is commercially produced by atmospheric separation. I would therefore expect helium sourced by air separation to cost roughly 1/4-1/5 the cost of krypton production, per liter, or 4-5 times as much per gram. A quick search on Google shows krypton at 65 cents per liter in the early 2000s (according to an article about windowpane gas filling). An Alibaba search indicates that 10-15 cents per liter may be more typical now.

If those krypton prices are accurate, and I haven't made any major mistakes with my helium ballparking, I would expect that applications like helium filled hard drives would see only a tiny cost increase should they be forced to use helium separated from the atmosphere. I think that most cryogenic cooling applications would have to move to closed-cycle reuse of helium. I don't know about welding and leak testing.

EDIT: "The Energy-Related Applications of Helium", 1980 report from Los Alamos National Laboratory, specifically considers helium production from atmospheric separation and from lean natural gas streams in section X.

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5141581

A.W. Francis has discussed the recovery of helium from the atmosphere by conventional methods. He predicts that, for helium produced from the atmosphere as a by-product from air separation plants, the cost would lie in the range of $200 to $300 per Mcf in 1973 dollars (over ten times present cost).

...

To go further and separate helium by similar techniques but with helium as the primary product would raise the cost by more than another order of magnitude to about $7000 Mcf in 1980 dollars.

Apparently one Mcf is 28,317 liters in SI units. That's 24.7 cents per liter of helium from the atmosphere in 1980 dollars, or 80 cents per liter in CPI-adjusted 2018 dollars.

criddell• 8 years ago

Helium is so light, won't it rise to the top of the atmosphere? Wouldn't that make it more difficult to extract from the atmosphere?

saagarjha6• 8 years ago

Helium is constantly produced by radioactive decay in the Earth’s crust. I’d assume that this is the helium that’s found in the atmosphere; the rest probably escapes.

philipkglass3• 8 years ago

Earth's atmosphere does not exhibit notable stratification by molecular weight until about 100 km up. The lower well-mixed portion is called the homosphere, and it is where these standard atmospheric composition values are measured. This near-uniform composition is also why, for instance, chlorofluorocarbons emitted at the surface reach the ozone layer and decompose it catalytically, even though their molecular weight is much greater than that of air.

garmaine2• 8 years ago

It's not rising to the top of the atmosphere per se, but rather that atomic helium is so light that at atmospheric temperature a significant percentage of individual atoms are moving at Earth's escape velocity. Usually they bounce into something else, but there's always some lucky few that make their way through the upper atmosphere... and keep going.

That's why, for example, Saturn's atmosphere is 25% helium and 75% hydrogen, but Saturn's moon Titan is basically all nitrogen-methane.

Which is also the real answer about helium. Hydrogen we have in near-infinite supply by breaking chemical bonds (e.g. in water). Helium doesn't react with anything, so so the small amount trapped in oil and natural gas deposits from Earth's radioactivity over billions of years is all we have. After that... we'd better start investing in outer solar system mining operations, skimming the atmospheres of gas giants.

I, for one, look forward to a future working the gas mines.

InclinedPlane3• 8 years ago

This is a hugely flawed analysis. Noble gases are extracted from air through liquefaction, which requires dropping the temperature of air to the point where certain component gases are liquid, allowing them to be separated off.

Krypton has a boiling point of 120 Kelvin, far higher than even Oxygen (90 K) or Nitrogen (77 K), making it trivial to extract Krypton at low cost from the atmosphere in any air liquefaction facility also set up to separate Oxygen and Nitrogen (which is basically all of them). Helium, however, boils at 4 Kelvin. It is not merely cryogenic, it is super cryogenic, and it can only be separated from air via liquefaction at extremely low temperatures.

Instead, the method that is actually used to produce almost all Helium is to use natural gas (which contains as much as 7% Helium) and then separate out all of the stuff that isn't Helium (starting with the hydrocarbons, of course). This makes it possible to produce 99.995% pure "grade-A" Helium fairly cost effectively. Every cubic meter of natural gas processed could yield up to 70 liters of grade-A Helium. Compare that to processing air, where every cubic meter of air processed would yield just 5 milliliters of low grade Helium. And Helium isn't valuable enough to simply run those plants and throw away the other gases produced.

By some estimates, if all of the Neon production facilities were modified to produce Helium as well then we might be able to meet 1/1000th of the world's Helium demand, so this is not a near-term solution to the problem, even if it might be able to produce the gas inexpensively.

Boxxed• 8 years ago

Naively, couldn't you extract helium by liquifying everything else and taking the leftover gas? So instead of cooling to 4 kelvin, cool to the boiling point of the element with the 2nd lowest boiling temperature. Or is that not helpful because that happens to be very low too?

HarryHirsch2• 8 years ago

You wonder about krypton and xenon, these are gases with only speciality applications and are probably minor byproducts from an air liquefaction plant. The market for helium is much much larger.

To ramp up production you'd have to build a new plant, and pay for it only through the sale of minor noble gases, the cross-subsidy from nitrogen and oxygen suddenly disappeared. Markets involving joint products are funny things.

restallus• 8 years ago

Krypton is relatively cheap because, while it is produced by atmospheric distillation, it is a by-product of oxygen/nitrogen production. The boiling point of oxygen is -183 °C, and the boiling point of krypton is -153 °C. This means that when you distill air and obtain liquid oxygen, krypton will necessarily also be obtained as a liquid.

Helium, however, has the very low boiling point of -267 °C. Commercial, high-scale production of oxygen doesn't even approach this temperature, so helium will never be distilled and instead be vented as a gas along with a residual air stream.

The point is that the price of krypton is actually the marginal cost of producing it from an existing process, while the price of helium will approach the cost of energy required to extract it, which can be calculated and is quite high.

dopamean• 8 years ago

I've got a really dumb question that maybe you can answer. Keep in mind the last time I was in a chemistry class was 10th grade (half my life ago)...

How is the boiling point of any of these elements determined? I cant imagine that we got some helium in its gaseous form and cooled it down below -267 degrees and then heated it up slowly to find out. Is there something about it's atomic makeup that allows that number to just be calculated? Thanks.

philipkglass3• 8 years ago

Those are good points. The report from LANL that I edited in after my original rough estimate mentions these issues too. It estimates an electricity requirement of about 170,000 kWh to produce one Mcf (28,317 liters) of helium by atmospheric separation in a dedicated plant. The cost of electricity dominates the overall process cost for helium production via atmospheric separation. In the state with the cheapest industrial electricity, Washington, it would cost nearly 27 cents per liter of helium for the electricity alone.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

ridgeguy• 8 years ago

OT, but kind of interesting - Xe, one of the 'inert' gases you've listed, is a remarkably effective and safe general anesthetic as well as a cardio- and neuroprotective agent for some kinds of ischemic events [1].

Still a little weird to those of us who studied chemistry when the 'noble gases' were famously reluctant to mingle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon#Anesthesia

goatsi• 8 years ago

It can even get you high: https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=102911

egypturnash• 8 years ago

I just get

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Cannot serve request to /content/science/en_US/2018/08/news-helium-mri-superconducting-markets-reserve-technology.html on this server

Here's the latest Wayback Machine link for it: http://web.archive.org/web/20180820221804/https://www.nation...

morganvachon• 8 years ago

I got that too, reloaded a few minutes later and it was fine.

coldtea• 8 years ago

Well, concern about Helium consumption has reached a high pitch.

patient_zero• 8 years ago

one of the links in the article leads to congress's passing of the helium privatization act of 1996. could the fragility if the helium markets be a self inflicted wound?

WindowsFon4life• 8 years ago

...They say in high pitched voice.

We Discovered Helium 150 Years Ago. Are We Running Out?

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