Helium Discovery In Northern Minnesota May Be Biggest Ever In North America

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Scientists and researchers are celebrating what they call a "dream" discovery after an exploratory drill confirmed a high concentration of helium buried deep in Minnesota's Iron Range. Thomas Abraham-James, CEO of Pulsar Helium, said the confirmed presence of helium could be one of the most significant such finds in the world. CBS News Minnesota toured the drill site soon after the drill rig first broke ground at the beginning of February. The discovery happened more than three weeks later at about 2 a.m. Thursday, as a drill reached its depth of 2,200 feet below the surface. According to Abraham-James, the helium concentration was measured at 12.4%, which is higher than forecasted and roughly 30 times the industry standard for commercial helium. "12.4% is just a dream. It's perfect," he said.

Now that helium is confirmed to be underground in Babbitt, Abraham-James said the next phase of the project is a feasibility study by an independent third party to study the size of the well and whether it could support a full-service helium plant. "It's not just about drilling one hole, but now proving up the geological models, being able to get some really good data that wasn't captured in the original discovery," he explained. "It has the potential to really contribute to local society." The company said the feasibility study could take until the end of the year to complete.

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[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

Try breathing it instead and save us from your stupidity.

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[Kernel Kurtz]

It won't be a car, it will be an unmanned aerial vehicle.

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[gavron]

And this is why slashdot is going the way of CNET and Republicans. Stupid is now the new "in" thing to be.

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[mcnster]

Finally, Zippy drives his 1958 RAMBLER METROPOLITAN into the faculty dining room!

"If elected, I pledge to each and every American a 55-year-old houseboy," as his brain cells started to bridge synapses.

(News for nerds??? I thought this was nude rap PSYCHOANALYSIS!!!)

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[mcnster]

$ sed -i -e's/started/strained/'

--
When in doubt, release it as Beta. (Or 4mm DAT, your call.)

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[cstacy]

Yow!

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[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

You In a fight between helium and Chuck Norris, who would win? ChatGPT In a hypothetical scenario, Chuck Norris is often portrayed as an unbeatable force due to the exaggerations and jokes surrounding his legendary toughness. On the other hand, helium is an inert gas commonly used to make things float and has no capacity for physical combat. So, in this imaginative contest, Chuck Norris would undoubtedly emerge as the winner. However, it's essential to remember that this is just a playful scenario and no

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[VeryFluffyBunny]

Imagine being cornered by a ChatGPT robot on cocaine at a party, telling you everything it knows in great detail.

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[paiute]

Chuck Norris enters the room designated for the fight. It is filled with his opponent, element number 2, competing under the name Helium honoring its Greek roots. After a few minutes of stretching and warming up, it gradually came to Norris that he was in fact an 83-year-old man breathing an inert atmosphere. He sagged to the floor. Neither Jesus nor any of Norris' fascist friends came to his aid, and he took a final oxygen-free breath. When he hit the earth, it did not, as one might have believed from many

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[chas.williams]

Chuck Norris' lungs would simply fuse the helium into oxygen. No contest.

Light and funny

[OrangAsm]

I always wondered why Minnesota felt lighter and everyone there has a funny accent.

Oh Geez

[cstacy]

Maybe we will be able to keep our MRI machines going for another decade. You betcha!

Re:Oh Geez

[Rei]

Lower prices = less incentive to recapture helium boiloff. Sigh. :(

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a helium doomer. There's LOTS of it in the ground (it's byproduct of radioactive decay). Concentrations vary wildly, but any random gas in the crust has some helium fraction, and some percent will have high helium fractions, and we're simply not going to run out of "gas in the crust". And even if we did, we can get helium as a byproduct of air liquefaction via additional processing stages, though the cost would be about an order of magnitude higher than today's helium prices.

But that said, I still don't like treating it as a throwaway commodity just because we can't be bothered to set up recapture systems. Is it really THAT much of an added cost to include either (A) a cheap bottling system + semi-frequent bottle returns; or (B) a re-liquefaction system, into MRIs and other medical or industrial systems (which, contrary to myths, waste the vast majority of helium, not party balloons)? Then again, we may well end up making the whole point moot by going to direct electrical cooling instead of buying helium as coolant...

Re: Oh Geez

[PPH]

We can always mine it from the sun.

Of course, we'll have to go there at night.

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[ceoyoyo]

Many MRI scanners were zero-boiloff fifteen years ago. It pretty much became standard five years ago. They have cold heads that recondense the helium.

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[Rei]

Hmm, maybe the market has shifted since I last looked into it. What percentage of MRIs actually deployed are zero-boiloff? I'm not sure what the mean lifespan on a MRI system is.

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[ceoyoyo]

Around 10 years, IIRC, but it depends on where you are.

Even non-zero boil off (human) scanners are pretty much all actively cooled to prevent the vast majority of the helium loss, although I'm sure you could find an old LN2 cooled one still chugging away somewhere that wasn't. Helium has always been expensive, and worse, fills take your scanner out of service.

Re: Oh Geez

[anonymouscoward52236]

One of the largest uses of Helium is in spaceships/rockets. Balloons and MRI machine usage are actually small in comparison.

How many Disneyland balloons...

[VeryFluffyBunny]

...worth of helium is down there?

Happy

[TJHook3r]

I bet the scientists are feeling positively buoyant this week

Edited

[RoccamOccam]

According to Abraham-James, the helium concentration was measured at 12.4%, which is higher than forecasted and roughly 30 times the industry standard for commercial helium. "12.4% is just a dream. It's perfect," he said in a squeaky, high-pitched voice.

Shambles

[sixsixtysix]

Cool, maybe they can come in and prop up the local economy, then leave it in shambles once it goes dry.
I mean, that's exactly what the mining companies did. I say this as a fromer Iron Ranger, whose grandfather was born in Babbitt.

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[ThePawArmy]

Yeah, fuck those companies that are the primary employer for an area for only a few decades...

And as a bonus...

[Applehu Akbar]

The CEO's speech announcing this find sounded hilarious!

Tower/Soudan mine lab use

[themightythor]

I wonder if that will be of any use in the nearby physics lab that they put in an old iron mine. https://www.soudan.umn.edu/ [umn.edu]

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[dsgrntlxmply]

Given this quote: "less than 100,000 times the cosmic radiation than on the surface", it seems likely that the Soudan mine is now populated by zombie mutants.

it's good as a strategic reserve

[argStyopa]

Because MN 'direct action' protesters are very practiced in techniques of ecoterrorism (with sympathetic local judges, natch!) meaning that retrieving it will be expensive and slow! Yay!

What is the rest of it?

[rossdee]

So if 12.4% of it is Helium, what is the other 87.6% ?