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Helium Crisis Approaching
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jan 14, 2008 08:09 AM
from the no-more-squeaky-voices dept.
from the no-more-squeaky-voices dept.
vrmlguy writes "Within nine years the National Helium Reserve will be depleted, according to an article in Science Daily. It quotes Dr. Lee Sobotka, of Washington University in St. Louis: 'Helium is non-renewable and irreplaceable. Its properties are unique and unlike hydrocarbon fuels (natural gas or oil), there are no biosynthetic ways to make an alternative to helium. All should make better efforts to recycle it.' (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a local article with quotes from Dr. Sobotka and representatives of the balloon industry.) On Earth, Helium is found mixed with natural gas, but few producers capture it. Extracting it from the atmosphere is not cost-effective. The US created a stockpile, the National Helium Reserve, in 1925 for use by military dirigibles, but stopped stockpiling it in 1995 as a cost-saving measure."
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No more helium? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No more helium? (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, whereas helium is less dense than air and thus raises your voice pitch, sulfur hexafluoride is more dense than air and thus lowers your voice pitch.
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
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Re:No more helium? (Score:5, Interesting)
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oh no! (Score:4, Funny)
oh the humanity!
Re:Look on the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Look on the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Look on the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Look on the bright side (Score:5, Funny)
Now that would be a cool sight. Dropping C02 filled balloons at a political rally. They wouldn't float down. They'd plummet straight to the ground and wouldn't even bounce. It wouldn't look natural.
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This is a capitalist economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is a capitalist economy (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:This is a capitalist economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Natural gas producers throw it away because it costs more to make than you can sell it for. The only reason for that is the US used to pay $5/liter for it and sells it for $1/liter and no longer buys it. (I made up those numbers - they're just illustrative but reflect the problem.)
Assuming there is a decent amount left underground once the shortage becomes acute people will be willing to pay more for helium. Once the market value raises above the cost to produce it people who dig it up will stop throwing it away. At that part the market would regulate its own helium supply/demand.
There really aren't any externalities in this market that I can see (unlike with fossil fuels - where pollution/CO2 needs to be accounted for) - so there is no reason the market wouldn't work. The main reason it isn't working now is because somebody messed with the market for the last 50 years and it will take some time to correct...
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Re:This is a capitalist economy (Score:5, Funny)
QED?
Quod Erat Donatum?
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Re:This is a capitalist economy (Score:5, Informative)
Whups! You fail Econ 101. A market in a resource that has no clear owner is not a "well-functioning market". In such cases, you do indeed get a race to the bottom as players race to claim the resource by extracting it. This is what is meant by "the tragedy of the commons". The answer is to actually provide a well-functioning market by having clear ownership of the resource while it is still unextracted. Owners then have an incentive to leave it in the ground if there is an expectation that it will become scarce and therefore its price will rise.
Nope, it's not. An externality is a cost the supplier incurs but does not have to pay. That's not what this is.
Chris Mattern
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Re:This is a capitalist economy (Score:5, Interesting)
Currently, there is clear ownership, there is no significant government oversight, yet what is the net result going to be if left to the market? The helium reserves (according to the article, and I will proceed with its assumptions, as I have no view of my own on this matter) will be mostly depleted relatively shortly.
What's the cause of this? It's true, owners have an incentive to leave it in the ground if it'll become valuable in the future. However, this only works perfectly in a world of perfectly rational abstracted actors. In the real world, owners also have an incentive to eat today, rather than starving now on the hope of a big payday in the future. Once the large capital investment has been made to install helium extractors, infrastructure, etc. on the wells, it is highly improbable an owner would let that all depreciate into nothing as you wait for a highly speculative payday in the future. It is only when the shortage is actually imminent, and the payday less speculative, that owners will realistically start holding off on pumping. It would be more realistic in the real world that owners would let it stay in the land if they hadn't already tapped it, but it does not appear from the article that this is the case.
Regarding your quibble about my use of the word externality, as I understand it, an externality is an impact upon a party not involved in a given transaction, and this understanding is supported by Wikipedia. Here, the transactions in question are between helium extractors and helium buyers. Yet the negative impact is felt by future generations, who are not current parties to this, yet will have to live in a world with insufficient helium for scientific and engineering usages, if the premise of the article is to be believed. Hence, negative externality.
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Re:This is a capitalist economy (Score:5, Insightful)
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helium toy balloons (Score:4, Insightful)
Well as it gets scarce the prices will go up. Maybe some people should start hoarding now
Re:helium toy balloons (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought of that. The problem is that it doesn't stay contained very well. If you bought one of those tanks, and never used it, it wouldn't keep for more than a few years. Even 100% air-tight containers might have a hard time containing helium.
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We need more gas (Score:4, Funny)
Re:We need more gas (Score:4, Funny)
We're screwed.
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Re:We need more gas (Score:5, Funny)
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Where's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't that mean that the offer outweighs the demand by a landslide? Doesn't this mean that there were a lot of people smooching the US national helium reserve for a long time?
Re:Where's the problem? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Where's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the problem? (Score:5, Informative)
One cannot "mine" helium. It comes dominantly from radioactive decay in the earth of Uranium and its decay products. But because it is so light, it generally leaks out of the ground, and escapes. Also because it is so light, it is not retained in the earth's atmosphere at all, and leaks into space (at which point it is irretrievable). Our supply right now comes from radioactive decay (over the last 5 billion years) which produced helium that accidentally got trapped in the earth (mostly in the same underground reservoirs as oil -- it is mixed in with natural gas). The half-life of Uranium is about 4.5 billion years, so the Helium is produced very slowly.
The problem is that it has widespread industrial and scientific uses, and its loss will have a severe impact on our science and industry. In particular it is used as a coolant (gets down to about 4K, and is the best way to get things to that temperature). Also it is used in any application requiring high field superconducting magnets. The fancy new High-T_c magnets generally cannot support large fields, so in fields like particle physics which require big magnets, they generally use simpler materials (e.g. Niobium-Titanium for the main LHC magnets [physicsworld.com]) that only superconduct at temperatures much lower than the liquid Nitrogen boiling point.
-- Bob
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damn. (Score:4, Funny)
Peak Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the End of the World, but you can see it from here, and if we're not careful Things Could Go Poorly. The problem is the smartest people around think "technology" will fix the "resource" problem. Given unlimited energy and resources, perhaps this is true, but we don't live in a world where there are unlimited resources. So, if we're at the top of the heap - look around you: this is as good as it gets.
RS
Re:Peak Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
As for technology fixing the problem... How do you know it won't? 100 years ago, they could have said the same... And been wrong. Nuclear was invented after that.
Every generation seems to think this is 'as good as it gets' and every generation has been proven wrong. Our technology is still advancing faster than ever.
Am I putting blind faith in technology? No. I think we should conserve and recycle. I think we should specifically research the issues of the day instead of random other things. But I also know that researching 'random other things' has created some of our best technology.
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Re:Peak Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you may need to adjust your frame of reference somewhat. Have a look at the fall of he Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, what happened to the Mayans, Easter Island etc. and think again about whether every generation has been proven wrong
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Re:Peak Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, we still have a long ways to go in terms of exploiting those laws of physics to generate energy/resources, but the fact remains that our "catalogue" of Earth's natural resources is largely complete.
We know what materials are available to us, we know which of those materials can be used to generate energy, and we know that we're quickly running out of all of them. Although Nuclear fusion/fission offer the promise of "turning nothing into something", even our current supply of fissile material is most certainly finite (and we must take great care to properly re-process and re-use spent fuel).
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm really not sure we're going to uncover any magical new energy sources in the near future. Fusion research should of course be pursued (preferably funding several different designs, as there are quite a few worthy candidates), although every current indication shows that viable Fusion generation is going to be *really* *really* difficult, even if we do figure out how to sustain the reaction.
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Re:Peak Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the smartest people around think "technology" will fix the "resource" problem. Given unlimited energy and resources, perhaps this is true, but we don't live in a world where there are unlimited resources.
Sheesh. Every century seems to have people who think, "Yeah, the good times are rolling now, but judgment day is coming! Repent now!
Will there be problems in the future? Of course there will. But then "magically" something will come along to solve them. To use the cliche, "necessity is the mother of invention." Look around you. We have supercapacitors that are being invented because of concern about oil prices (by the way, we will NEVER run out of oil. NEVER. It will just get more expensive until something else replaces it). We can fire up nuclear plants (and breeder reactors) anytime we want (and really, really need to). We've just had an article the other day about new solid-state solar stirling engines, and another one about mass-production solar cells to reduce cost. Some of them will pan out, some of them won't. But it is absolutely true that civilization isn't going to collapse. In fact, civilization is, at most, going to be slightly inconvenienced. SUVs will always be available (thank God).
The solar system is FLOODED with energy. It really is effectively unlimited.
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Re:Peak Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Do take a stroll by any of your local industrial plants -- doesn't matter what it is. Steel, say. Or a gas liquification plant. Now figure out how you're going to get all of that into space. Not orbit, you need it orbiting the sun, not the Earth because the stuff you're talking about what we want isn't floating around around the earth. Now figure out how you're going to shield it from radiation, and feed the hundreds of employees. And keep in mind all of that capacity is to produce something for a regional demand, not a global demand.
Even when you've got it, now figure out how you're going to get it back down to the ground. (We'll ignore the fact that most of the resources are tied up in other gravity wells...)
Your statement may be intellectually correct, but its about as realistic as sitting in the jungles of central america 12,000 years ago and taking solice in the availability of some resource you need, buried a mile inside of Everest and nowhere else.
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Increase public awareness (Score:5, Insightful)
That, my friends is one of the best reasons for putting money into space exploration rather than wars for oil. We're still far from being able to actually mine anything that's not already on our planet, but we're not so far from a shortage in the critical resources that would make extraterrestrial retrieval of resources possible in the first place.
With Helium it's actually a matter of re-using what we have - gas recycling hasn't been much of an issue in the past, but people need to hear about it. And please don't throw 'statistical evidence' at me that suggests 'there is no crisis'. Even the potential crisis is enough to be worried about it, if the implications are that dramatic. Much of our economical and scientific growth currently depends on the reckless abuse of non-renewable (or non-renewed) resources. We don't want to break Moore's Law, do we?
Re:Increase public awareness (Score:5, Informative)
According to wikipedia the applications of helium
* Because it is lighter than air, airships and balloons are inflated with helium for lift. In airships, helium is preferred over hydrogen because it is not flammable and has 92.64% of the buoyancy (or lifting power) of the alternative hydrogen (see calculation.)
* For its low solubility in water, the major part of human blood, air mixtures of helium with oxygen and nitrogen (Trimix), with oxygen only (Heliox), with common air (heliair), and with hydrogen and oxygen (hydreliox), are used in deep-sea breathing systems to reduce the high-pressure risk of nitrogen narcosis, decompression sickness, and oxygen toxicity.
* At extremely low temperatures, liquid helium is used to cool certain metals to produce superconductivity, such as in superconducting magnets used in magnetic resonance imaging. Helium at low temperatures is also used in cryogenics.
* For its inertness and high thermal conductivity, neutron transparency, and because it does not form radioactive isotopes under reactor conditions, helium is used as a coolant in some nuclear reactors, such as pebble-bed reactors.
* Helium is used as a shielding gas in arc welding processes on materials that are contaminated easily by air. It is especially useful in overhead welding, because it is lighter than air and thus floats, whereas other shielding gases sink.
* Because it is inert, helium is used as a protective gas in growing silicon and germanium crystals, in titanium and zirconium production, in gas chromatography, and as an atmosphere for protecting historical documents. This property also makes it useful in supersonic wind tunnels.
* In rocketry, helium is used as an ullage medium to displace fuel and oxidizers in storage tanks and to condense hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel. It is also used to purge fuel and oxidizer from ground support equipment prior to launch and to pre-cool liquid hydrogen in space vehicles. For example, the Saturn V booster used in the Apollo program needed about 13 million cubic feet (370,000 m) of helium to launch.[2]
* The gain medium of the helium-neon laser is a mixture of helium and neon.
* Because it diffuses through solids at a rate three times that of air, helium is used as a tracer gas to detect leaks in high-vacuum equipment and high-pressure containers, as well as in other applications with less stringent requirements such as heat exchangers, valves, gas panels, etc.
* Because of its extremely low index of refraction, the use of helium reduces the distorting effects of temperature variations in the space between lenses in some telescopes.
* The age of rocks and minerals that contain uranium and thorium, radioactive elements that emit helium nuclei called alpha particles, can be discovered by measuring the level of helium with a process known as helium dating.
* The high thermal conductivity and sound velocity of helium is also desirable in thermoacoustic refrigeration. The inertness of helium adds to the environmental advantage of this technology over conventional refrigeration systems which may contribute to ozone depleting and global warming effects.
* Because helium alone is less dense than atmospheric air, it will change the timbre (not pitch[12]) of a person's voice when inhaled. However, inhaling it from a typical commercial source, such as that used to fill balloons, can be dangerous due to the risk of asphyxiation from lack of oxygen, and the number of contaminants that may be present. These could include trace amounts of other gases, in addition to aerosolized lubricating oil.
Maybe I'm missing the usefulness of some of those but it doesn't seem like a big deal.
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scavenging (Score:5, Informative)
This may be a pretty damn cool use for bio-science too, as I seem to remember articles about modified plants that could be placed about areas such as garbage dumps etc and absorb various metallic minerals from the ground. Maybe one day we'll see people growing trees of copper and aluminum over previous landfills, leeching bits of once-discarded waste metals from the ground.
I wouldn't say that the lack of raw materials shouldn't be a concern, but in the perhaps it will actually force society to view such things as less "disposable" and further the science and industry of re-use in the future.
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Funny thing (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, folks, helium is looked at for a number of important uses esp nuclear power, medical, and welding.
Cost effective? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not now, but as the availability goes down and focus turns to finding ways to extract helium more efficiently, along with a sharp price rise, then the incipient profit involved in extraction will likely create a market for atmospheric or some other method of extraction... or perhaps lead to the future ability to synthesise helium.
My question: can any science-types here list some important uses of helium? I'm sure that there are some, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
Re:Cost effective? (Score:5, Informative)
- Cryogenics---including the superconducters used by MRI machines---often uses liquid Helium, though MRI machines might be using high-temperature superconductors now; I'm not sure.
- Welding---the various *IG welders use helium in mixtures of gases to protect the high-temperature metal from the air.
- Lasers---Helium-Neon lasers are sometimes used.
Wikipedia's Helium page. [wikipedia.org] has more details.Parent
Re:Cost effective? (Score:4, Interesting)
First, most if not all high-temp superconductors are ceramics, which are hard to make into coils of wire. So that's why they don't get used much in magnets.
Second, superconductivity is inhibited by magnetic fields - the lower the temperature the more field you can sustain. So even if you could barely get by with LN2 you still end up using He in magnets...
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Hydrogen balloons would be more fun (Score:4, Funny)
Helium is a rebel, a loner (Score:4, Funny)
Helium: the James Dean of elements. All by itself in the upper right hand corner of the periodic table.
Which I guess makes hydrogen the Paris Hilton of elements? Alone at the top??
Why oh why couldn't I have been a science journalist...
Re:Helium is a rebel, a loner (Score:5, Funny)
It also bonds with pretty much anything it meets.
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Supply and demand (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget the physics (Score:4, Insightful)
1. It's the smallest atom/molecule, since hydrogen is diatomic and H2 is a bit bigger than He. This makes it more difficult to store as it can get through any holes in a container
2. It escapes from the atmosphere. So, once it's out of the container it goes into outer space and is gone forever.
Some information about helium (Score:5, Informative)
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/helium/ [usgs.gov]
You can buy helium from the US government at $2.037 per cubic metre, whilst the commercial price is nearer $3 per cubic metre; adjusting that would seem to make some kind of sense, since the US has 600 million cubic metres of the stuff in Amarillo.
There are plants at Skikda in Algeria and somewhere in Qatar which aim to extract 25 million cubic metres from natural gas a year, but there have been some issues in getting them to work; both Algeria and Qatar's natural gas reserves contain about as much helium as the US total reserves do.
It is impossible to substitute for helium for cryogenics; nothing else stays liquid at that low a temperature, and the ultra-refrigerators that get to liquid helium temperatures use helium as working fluid.
I did my PhD at Nottingham University, which uses a fair amount of liquid helium; the arrangement there is that it's delivered to the MRI building at the top of the hill, and the boil-off passes through a liquifier and is used by the theoretical physicists at the bottom of the hill. I don't know what the theoretical physicists do with their boil-off; there are obvious practical problems with running piping from lots of separate labs to a central liquifier, and liquifiers are bulky and vibrating enough that you don't want to have them in the same lab as your delicate semiconductor-physics experiment.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:wha?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Time to ramp up fusion research (Score:5, Funny)
2) ?????
3) <squeakyvoice> Profit! </squeakyvoice>
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Re:Time to ramp up fusion research (Score:5, Informative)
That's not really practical. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that a fusion reactor can convert 10% of the power from its reaction to electricity.
The most promising reaction, according to Wikipedia, is that of:
First of all, there is the Deuterium. This is harvested from Heavy Water, water that has one or two deuterium atoms instead of normal hydrogen atoms. This heavy water costs approximately US$300/kg[2] for consumers, and the deuterium produced approximately US$1/L[3]. This is a lot. Deuterium has a molar mass of approximately two g/mol, with one mole of a gas taking up one cubic metre at standard temperature/pressure. At US$1/L, this deuterium costs US$1000/m^3, or US$500/g (I'm assuming that gases volumes refer to STP. If I'm wrong, feel free to point this out---I've never dealt with bottled gas).
Next is tritium. At US$30000/g[4], it's hardly cheap. For the reaction to take place, you need the two isotopes to react stoichiometrically (in the proper ratio). IOW, for each mole of tritium, you need a mole of deuterium. Converted to masses (tritium's molar mass is approximately three), this means that you need a ratio of 3g tritium : 2g deuterium. For each mole of Tritium, you will get a mole of helium. Because we're dealing with helium-4, the molar mass is ~4g/mol. The rest of the mass is made up by the neutron; this doesn't matter to us. Therefore, to make four grams of helium, we need three grams of tritium, and two grams of deuterium. At the prices given, this is US$91000 per four grams of helium, which, because it is one mole, is one cubic metre at STP. Helium, as of 1986 (yeah, yeah, I know) cost US$37.50/1000f^3. This is about US$1.30/m^3. Think about those prices. 9.1 x 10^4 US$/m^3, vs 1.3 x 10^0 US$/m^3. That's almost five orders of magnitude. There would have to be be a bloody good reason to be using helium at those prices.
In conclusion:
Helium-4 produced by fusion will cost five orders of magnitude more than current prices
References:
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Nuclear fusion is an absurdly poor source of He (Score:5, Informative)
The fusion of 1kg of deuterium produces near enough 1kg of helium, and, umm, 2.7MeV per fusion * 6*10^23 atoms per mole * 500 moles of D atoms per kilogram / 2 deuteriums per fusion * 1.6e-19 joules per eV = 64.8 terajoules of energy.
So, a one-gigawatt fusion power plant would produce a kilo of helium every eighteen days; if the current electricity use of France were provided entirely by fusion plants, you'd get thirty tons a year. The large hadron collider uses 120 tons of helium, but efficiently; present planetary helium use is about seventy-five tons a day.
For comparison, the US produces from natural gas about 76 million cubic metres of helium a year; a cubic metre of helium weighs 1000/22.4*4 grams, so 76 million cubic metres weigh about fifteen thousand tons.
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