Still super expensive though! I guess at least it's available again. I remember doing some liquid helium experiments in class in college just as the helium crunch started. The department didn't seem very happy suddenly having to spend hundreds of dollars extra just to let some undergrads play with it. I wonder if they discontinued that particular experiment.
There has never been a helium shortage. It’s just more costly than scientists would prefer. If they were willing to pay even more, massive more amounts would be available.
"shortage" here is meant something like how you used it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203174 with "you disincentive people with lots of bottled water who were about to drive it across the country to address your shortage."
"Recurrent helium shortages and high prices have led some academic researchers to install liquefiers to recycle helium that boils off from their instruments."
Yeah, it can't have been a real shortage if they were just letting it boil away.
Seems to pay for itself pretty quickly for large users. The one guy who saved 90% of his helium costs probably paid for his in a year or two given the price listed
Yep. Ten years ago helium recycling in cryogenics was unheard of. Today not recycling helium in cryogenics is unheard of. You send it back to be purified and condensed and some of the savings is passed back to the customer.
Nobody cared when it cost $0.50/l. They do when it’s $5/l.
Ten years ago I worked in a building with a helium liquified for recycling. I also knew someone who bought a fancy cryogenic system that didn’t consume helium because it was worth the premium to avoid needing to pay for helium.
> Ten years ago helium recycling in cryogenics was unheard of.
That depends on both time period and location.
In the late 80's I worked in a physics lab in the US that had an old helium recuperation system installed (as gas, I don't think they had a liquifier) but it wasn't in use, we just boiled off 100's to 1000's of liters each week. I assume it must have been used at some point in time though.
In Europe helium has traditionally been much more expensive than in the US (not sure about the situation currently) and I think many labs recovered it. At CERN all the helium was reliquified, except for one time when the liquifier broke down and they boiled off about 20000 liters testing LEP superconducting RF cavities.
Of course it can. When a material with a highly inelastic but until now sufficient supply experiences a demand spike or supply drop, and mitigating investments in equipment and new sources are capital intensive and take a significant amount of time to implement, you can have severe shortages. I can't see how that's a contentious concept. Markets can often correct for supply/demand imbalances, but not instantly and perfectly.
Also market prices rising with demand don't themselves increase supply, again not instantly anyway. It doesn't matter how high the prices goes, if there is insufficient supply to meet the demand some people will be priced out. That's not even got anything to do with markets and certainly not a market failure, it doesn't matter how allocation is determined, not everyone will get what they need, at least for a while.
Similarly, I've heard of HVAC systems that just use city water for cooling. It comes in cold, dump heat into it and let it run down the drain.
Running like that all the time seems unconscionable, but it makes a lot of sense as a backup while the primary is down for repair, as a very cheap-to-install but wasteful-to-run system that would be appropriate for short durations only.
There are plenty of hot places with enough fresh water supplies that trying to conserve water is of dubious value.
The problem with fresh water isn’t the overall supply of fresh water. It’s getting it to communities that need it, when they need it, and distributing it without contaminating it.
I think the biggest costs of sewage treatment is removing solids and hazardous contaminants. Diluting wastewater with moderate volumes of potable water may not mean much to the whole-cycle.
It's not nearly as bad as watering a lawn, where water goes out clean and comes back as contaminated runoff that has to be captured and treated or dumped.
> Similarly, I've heard of HVAC systems that just use city water for cooling. It comes in cold, dump heat into it and let it run down the drain.
My grandparents had a system that worked basically on that principle. Since they lived in a farming town it used irrigation water which was much cheaper than tap water.
Are you sure you're not confusing what you're describing with evaporative cooling? I don't think that the thermal delta between tap water and a warm room is enough to justify the cost of filtered municipal tap water. For comparison, if the HVAC system simply fed the water into the radiators and dumped it, the max amount of heat you can capture is around 63J per gram of water (opportunistic assumptions of the water coming in at 5C and leaving at 20C). By comparison, if you evaporate the water, the latent heat of evaporation of water alone is 2257J per gram.
I don't know for certain, but I didn't see any evaporators at the facility. Some places with high atmospheric humidity might have a hard time with evaporative cooling anyway.
I think they might've been running a Freon loop with the condenser in tap water, to achieve higher thermal delta and just skip the enormous radiators and fans.
> Similarly, I've heard of HVAC systems that just use city water for cooling. It comes in cold, dump heat into it and let it run down the drain.
Whether or not that's wasteful really depends on where exactly it's happening. If the city water is being pumped out of a fossil aquifer, that's obviously a problem. If the water is coming out of a reservoir with abundant supply, the water being "used" is merely taking a slight detour from what it would otherwise do ("river→reservoir→hvac→river→ocean" rather than "river→ocean".) There could be some energy losses in the pumping and processing of the water, depending on where it's happening, but that's not the water itself being wasted.
In general shortages are less common than cheapskates. Helium is strange though. It is generally produced as a byproduct of natural gas. This means that its availability is largely driven by an unrelated market that is much larger and more lucrative. There is a big discontinuity in the price of helium as a byproduct and the price of helium as a primary good. Thus the supply of helium is relatively inelastic. Doubling the price does almost nothing to change the quantity supplied.
I personally recall a period around 2013 when suppliers simply did not have helium to sell.
How far are we from helium being the primary good?
The price of natural gas is going lower and lower (and with strict environmental laws, might go even lower as companies move to other energy sources...
How close are we to the value of helium being greater than the value of the methane?
Before the helium price dive I had calculated the break over was wells with approximately 6% He concentration; the problem is the places that have this don’t have gas gathering systems and anything you try to do with the gas makes it uneconomical.
My major professor used to say that LN costs the same as milk, while LH costs the same as scotch. That was many decades ago - things haven’t changed, I guess.
Do people not realize that you can extract helium in the air? Granted current methods are somewhat inefficient, it's totally possible to do with today's technology.
According to a quick Google, it's in the air at a concentration of 5ppm. For loose comparison sake, this is like pumping out an Olympic sized swimming pool to extract 10 litres of the good stuff. You certainly won't be doing that to fill children's balloons.
Note that the price of gold is much higher than the price of helium.
If helium prices rise high enough, then yes, we will extract it from the atmosphere. And scientists will be sad because the they won't be able to afford as much of it anymore.
Yeah this is completely misleading. How the fuck do you they think they got neon? The only way you can get it is from from the atmosphere. Helium occurs in similar concentrations and maintains the same level overtime due the radioactive decay. Actually it's probably increased due to natural gas extraction. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984GeCoA..48.1759O/abstra...
The atmosphere is not stratified into layers of different gasses. All gasses are mixed throughout the atmosphere, so you also find enough Helium at the bottom where we live. Indeed, all gasses in the atmosphere get less dense with increasing height, so helium has the highest pressure/density at the ground. [1]
At the same time, lighter gasses have vertical distributions that reach higher up into space, and some helium does get lost as it "boils off" from earth over time.
Nitrogen or CO₂. But you will not be happy with it, there is a reason more expensive mixtures are preferred. Also, the required protective gear against the NOx and added postprocessing of your workpiece more than make up for the gas price...
The cheapest way overall is actually the commonly used Argon. Its just not cheapest if you just stare at the price of the gas alone.
Interesting. It is the third most abundant gas in the atmosphere,; more than water vapor and carbon dioxide actually according to Wikipedia. It is produced via fractional distillation. We really should be using this stuff instead of helium where possible. I'm guessing it's density makes it more of a renewable resource than helium.
We do use it where possible. But at higher temperature like for welding, Nitrogen is no longer inert. And liquid nitrogen is too warm for the things you need liquid Helium for. Other alternatives are usually even more expensive or dangerous. You would never use liquid O₂ for cooling if you can avoid it...
Ah, maybe you meant CO₂, it is similar to N₂ in all those aspects. Just even more reactive, warmer in liquid form than even nitrogen. And in addition never liquid at atmospheric pressure and actively poisonous to humans. So usually worse than N₂.
There are just a few applications where its used that I know of: Dry ice, environment-friendly coolant, sparkling drinks and killing lifestock.
A lot of times the supplier matters as much (more than?) the gas. Ask around in your area.
Avoid bottle rental at all costs if you can... buy your own or bottle swap are the best.
Agree with sibling poster; just get argon for mild, stainless or alu. It is absolutely the standard for the tig process.
Most times gas is not an appreciable cost, usually time or materials but I guess it could be a factor if you're welding up a lot of scrap and count your time as free.
I haven't added it up but I think I spend more on grinder discs than gas :p
Argon. Unless you’re specifically doing something really abnormal there’s a reason it’s the most common shielding gas. Compared to the rest of the process the shielding gas shouldn’t be much of the total cost. If you want to minimize cost don’t rent your cylinder. You can usually find a cheap one used and just exchange it on your first refill if it’s within test date.
And it'll improve. There was a helium find with absolutely insane natural concentrations in South Africa recently.
>Helium is found within natural gas in concentrations typically up to 1% by volume of the gas released; however, the updated reserve review shows that the latest well drilled in the Virgina project contains a concentration of almost 11%.
But if this reserve is 6-25 billion cubic feet, that’s probably just a drop in the bucket as annual global production is 15-20 billion cubic feet and US reserves are over 700 billion cubic feet.
If you are discussing US natural gas reserves, PUDs are three orders of magnitude higher at over 700Tcf. Going beyond this, some estimates put unproven unconventional supplies at over 700Tcf in-place in the Anadarko basin alone. Considering we haven’t really been hell bent on hunting for gas in the last decade, the true extent of the supply may be radically larger still.
Helium is abundant; it’s prices simply haven’t ever stayed high enough to warrant wider extraction from the gas supply. The last time we did that we produced the strategic helium reserve which has basically fed our consumption for 60 years!
This might be painful for scientists to hear but they actually _need_ helium prices to rise (No pun intended). It's the best way to make sure the substance isn't wasted.
Once humanity is able to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium, we'll have more helium than we'll know what to do with.
Also, why is everyone measuring helium in volume (litres, cubic feet)? This is highly dependent on temperature and pressure. Why not state quantities in terms of mass?
> Also, why is everyone measuring helium in volume (litres, cubic feet)? This is highly dependent on temperature and pressure. Why not state quantities in terms of mass?
This problem appears way more often than I'd like. In measuring gas flow through valves there's a quantity called "standard cubic feet per minute". The only problem is that there is no uniformly agreed upon standard reference temperature and pressure!
It's even worse than described on Wikipedia, as I've found at least one valve manufacturer claims that the reference pressure is the pressure they used upstream of the valve, not something near atmospheric as Wikipedia claims is typical: http://btrettel.nerfers.com/archives/72
Whenever I get a valve I either have to do my own flow tests or call the manufacturer and hope I get someone who knows a thing or two about their testing procedures.
As you said, the entire issue can be avoided by simply specifying mass or moles. I don't quite know why people don't do this, but I suppose it speaks to the power of tradition. Far too few people think about if what they are doing makes sense.
No, we won't. The whole point of fusion power is that it takes very little fuel to produce a lot of energy. That means very little helium ash produced.
If all of the world's current electric power production were fueled by fusion, the helium produced would be a drop in the bucket compared to the total existing helium market.
To illustrate this point, producing all of the electricity the United States uses in a year by D-T fusion would give around 20-100 kg of helium depending on efficiency.
Probably because that's how it is sold. They measure the volume of the container it is being sold in. The mom running up to Party City to buy canisters of Helium to fill balloons for little Johnny's birthday doesn't care about how much mass it is.
> This is highly dependent on temperature and pressure.
Probably because they are talking about liquefied helium.
A convention to reserve mass as the unit of sale for elements in gaseous form seems reasonable, you would want to receive a Very Large Bladder of gas when ordering supplies for an experiment that needs to be chilled with helium.
>> a Colorado State University chemist who orders a 60-liter dewar every 8–13 weeks to fill his 8-tesla superconducting magnet.
So... absolutely no recapture of this used helium? I wouldn't be throwing stones at party balloons. Seriously, the concept of helium as a disposable gas is the root of the entire price problem. Hopefully the price will rise to the point that capture and recycling become more cost effective.
>>A new, $110 000 liquefier at the University of Idaho is expected to recycle most of the helium needed for three NMR magnets, an electron paramagnetic resonance magnet, and a Mössbauer spectrometer, says Blumenfeld. As an added benefit, the new machine will enable the university to purchase its helium in gaseous form instead of liquid, for a substantial cost savings, he says.
110K? That is dirt cheap for nearly any industrial process. Industrial baking ovens can cost more. Why are such things not standard with every device needing substantial amounts of helium.
You said it yourself, it's not common because the price is low. Let's not devote the valuable hours of human labor towards recapturing a gas at higher efficiencies than necessary when there's food, family time, and other technologies that could also use that same attention.
>> when there's food, family time, and other technologies that could also use that same attention.
Because unlike food and family, helium is a finite resource. Once it is released into the air, it is gone. It will float up and literally into space. By protecting and conserving it now we won't have to panic once it becomes truly rare.
>Because unlike food and family, helium is a finite resource. [...] By protecting and conserving it now we won't have to panic once it becomes truly rare.
Is there a need to preemptively conserve? As it becomes rarer, prices will increase which will naturally encourage conservation. At the same time, new supply will come online as they become economical due to the higher prices.
You can pay in to recapture now and have it cheap enough for everything later as our needs expand, or you can fritter it away now and have it become a burden on our future expanding needs and have to pay in to recapture it then anyway. Not recapturing now sounds like a tax on future generations.
Nothing against you because I held the same views in the past but I think this is a very dangerous line of thinking. Not everything can be solved with "when it's scare we will come up with alternatives" or "even if the alternatives aren't efficient enough now we will improve them if we run into a scarcity issue".
I hear this around energy most often. Oil is becoming more and more expensive ($$ and energy-wise) to extract (I find the best way to look at how many barrels of oil are extracted for the energy cost of 1 barrel). This number has been falling ever since the first well was tapped. We have used up all the "easy oil" and moving on to things like fracking which, environmental damage aside, does not have good returns and some of the major drill sites have adjusted their predicted yield down sharply (also fracking sites have a steep fall off where normal wells have more of a bell curve). The problem is: we have no viable substitute for oil (/gas). The world runs on oil.
Solar is great but you can't put it in a tank or ship across the ocean or fly and battery tech isn't really close to closing that gap. You also can't make plastic from solar energy. Not to mention converting all our cars, trucks, etc to battery-powered is not a fast or cheap process. I highly recommend watching these videos on Energy Economics [0], Peak Cheap Oil [1], and Shale Oil [2] (aka fracking).
All of this to say, I think it's dangerous to assume that we will have the time (or money) to reverse or halt the loss of non-renewable materials. Especially since if any of these start to get really expensive due to lower supply/higher demand it will kick off a number of other issues. If the price of oil spikes that affects a ton of our economy from gas, to plastics, and more.
Plastics and liquid fuels can be manufactured starting from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Hydrogen of course can be produced via the electrolysis of water with solar electricty.
Carbon Recycling International already operates a commercial methanol plant for making methanol using renewable electrolytic hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
This article "Process Advantages of Direct CO2 to Methanol Synthesis" has a lot of details:
Methanol is a portable liquid that can be used directly as a fuel. It is also convertible to the olefins (alkenes) propylene and ethylene, the two most common plastic feedstocks. China has built millions of tons of capacity for methanol-to-olefins in the past decade, though unfortunately their input methanol is mostly produced from coal.
See e.g. this recent plant that came on stream: "World’s largest single-train methanol-to-olefins plant now operating"
Helium is one of the very few mineral resources that is simultaneously industrially important, scarce, difficult to substitute, and exhibits poor prospects for higher sustainable terrestrial production.
The other few elements in this small club are (IMO) the platinum group metals and rhenium.
The planet Jupiter is a quarter helium by mass, so I propose we deliberately waste all our helium on earth then use that as an excuse to start mining operations in space.
It works but is super super inefficient, and actually using hydrogen directly as a fuel also has huge drawbacks, primarily due to the fact that it is prone to detonate vs simply combust. Unfortunately I don’t believe hydrogen is going to ever be viable at global scale unless it’s simply used to synthesize artificially produced petrochemicals, an even more inefficient process.
Pricing is based on current extraction cost but the potential future need is not something that can be predicted accurately. For something that could be very important, and that is used so frivolously, yes, we should probably preemptively conserve helium gas.
This may make me sound like a jerk, and perhaps I am, but:
Helium is only a finite resource at this price point. We could extract harder to get to reserves, or even make our own by fusioning hydrogen, if the price was high enough.
$100K is a lot of money for some experimental low temperature labs. The other issue is that vibrations from compressor units can interfere with sensitive experiments like scanning tunneling microscopy. Helium is expensive enough as it is that I think most labs would like to recycle it, but there are drawbacks.
If helium is a precious resource (it is), we should use federal dollars to incentive better management and recycling of it by academic and research users. Very similar to how we incentivize energy efficiency with grants and tax policy.
It is a matter of economics. Even at $20 per liter, that research group only pays $8k per year. It would be hard for them to justify dropping $100k on a liquifier to their funding agencies. Doing that would bump up the amount of money they ask for on a grant by an order of magnitude. Most groups use liquid helium even more sparingly than them.
I'm in a huge research university and I am only familiar with one group that has a liquifier and it's because they move through Helium on the kiloliter scale.
My institution takes the long game: Physics as a department has a (£1m, ~2000l / overnight run) liquefier that is used nearly continuously and pays for itself in the long run.
This is the tragedy of the commons for climate change all over again: individually, we profit by polluting as not doing so involves a cost; societally we win overall by changing our behaviour collectively. A helium liquefier and recovery system is exactly the sort of thing a competent departmental head should support.
For even more fun, dig into the sources of any articles with the "Resource X is running out!". E.g, this BBC article about Helium prices from Septh 2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49715838
Then dig into the numbers behind the articles which tend to be weakly sourced and full of anecdotes rather than data.
From that BBC article:
> At the auction, the average price for crude helium rose a whopping 135% year-on-year as industrial users acted to boost stocks for future years.
> "It wasn't very difficult for major suppliers to pass this increase on to their customers, so it did affect worldwide pricing," says [Phil Kornbluth, the founder of Kornbluth Helium Consulting, which advises clients on commercial aspects of the global helium business, says the "price has gone up an awful lot in a short space of time"].
So there's a single source and it's someone who benefits from the price going up.
We actually ran out of oil reserves when the price dropped to zero earlier this year, because reserves are defined as "oil that can be extracted at cost at current market prices".
It didn't make the headlines because "oil reserves depleted" would sound illogical while gasoline is cheap.
If the boy cries wolf, but nobody else sees it, how do you decide if the boy was mistaken/lied or if the act of the entire town waking up scared the wolf away?
To expand on this, it's tempting to dismiss those warning of doom and gloom when you start to notice a pattern of the doom never materializing.
But we should also be aware of the possibility that those warning of doom and gloom activate people's minds to severity and risk of the problem. Because more people are aware and paying attention, we collectively take action to mitigate the risk and the worst case never happens.
A great example is our response to a pandemic. The response that creates the least amount of damage might look like a major over-reaction and people will start to question those who raised alarm with such intensity.
I’m glad the conversation has evolved from “we’re running out of helium”.
We’re only running out of helium if we’ve quit extracting fossil fuels.
Helium is a byproduct of extraction, and is most commonly vented into the atmosphere because it’s not commercially viable to process it due to its low price.
Fun fact, if you've ever driven from Texas to Colorado, you'll pass the largest Helium producing plant in the US just a few miles north of Amarillo, TX - on, aptly named Helium Plant Road.
When the whole shortage made the news, I had heard that the plant was for sale, and I actually talked with my wife and joked that we could buy the plant and corner a significant portion of the Helium market. LOL! I thought it would be pretty cool to own a significant part of the production of a single element.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadYeah, it can't have been a real shortage if they were just letting it boil away.
Nobody cared when it cost $0.50/l. They do when it’s $5/l.
Do you perhaps mean twenty years ago?
That depends on both time period and location.
In the late 80's I worked in a physics lab in the US that had an old helium recuperation system installed (as gas, I don't think they had a liquifier) but it wasn't in use, we just boiled off 100's to 1000's of liters each week. I assume it must have been used at some point in time though.
In Europe helium has traditionally been much more expensive than in the US (not sure about the situation currently) and I think many labs recovered it. At CERN all the helium was reliquified, except for one time when the liquifier broke down and they boiled off about 20000 liters testing LEP superconducting RF cavities.
Also market prices rising with demand don't themselves increase supply, again not instantly anyway. It doesn't matter how high the prices goes, if there is insufficient supply to meet the demand some people will be priced out. That's not even got anything to do with markets and certainly not a market failure, it doesn't matter how allocation is determined, not everyone will get what they need, at least for a while.
Running like that all the time seems unconscionable, but it makes a lot of sense as a backup while the primary is down for repair, as a very cheap-to-install but wasteful-to-run system that would be appropriate for short durations only.
The problem with fresh water isn’t the overall supply of fresh water. It’s getting it to communities that need it, when they need it, and distributing it without contaminating it.
It's not nearly as bad as watering a lawn, where water goes out clean and comes back as contaminated runoff that has to be captured and treated or dumped.
My grandparents had a system that worked basically on that principle. Since they lived in a farming town it used irrigation water which was much cheaper than tap water.
I think they might've been running a Freon loop with the condenser in tap water, to achieve higher thermal delta and just skip the enormous radiators and fans.
They're generally on top of the building, and they kinda look like generic air conditioning units. https://www.munters.com/en/munters/products/coolers--humidif...
Whether or not that's wasteful really depends on where exactly it's happening. If the city water is being pumped out of a fossil aquifer, that's obviously a problem. If the water is coming out of a reservoir with abundant supply, the water being "used" is merely taking a slight detour from what it would otherwise do ("river→reservoir→hvac→river→ocean" rather than "river→ocean".) There could be some energy losses in the pumping and processing of the water, depending on where it's happening, but that's not the water itself being wasted.
The price of natural gas is going lower and lower (and with strict environmental laws, might go even lower as companies move to other energy sources...
How close are we to the value of helium being greater than the value of the methane?
Probably pretty far away.
I'm guessing that the amount of helium that's recovered from natural gas wells is pretty small compared to the natural gas recovered.
Even if no one uses it for power, there's still home heating, vehicle fuel and plastic feedstock.
Methane is a primary input for nitrogen fertilizers.
(arguably the input, as the nitrogen comes from air, which (obviously) is readily and abundantly available.)
Not sure which way the Helium market works though.
Sounds line gold mining... I'm sure they'd do it if needed for scientific purposes... or if they discover some health benefits to heliumtalk
If helium prices rise high enough, then yes, we will extract it from the atmosphere. And scientists will be sad because the they won't be able to afford as much of it anymore.
At the same time, lighter gasses have vertical distributions that reach higher up into space, and some helium does get lost as it "boils off" from earth over time.
[1]: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/a/61154/14998
The cheapest way overall is actually the commonly used Argon. Its just not cheapest if you just stare at the price of the gas alone.
There are just a few applications where its used that I know of: Dry ice, environment-friendly coolant, sparkling drinks and killing lifestock.
Avoid bottle rental at all costs if you can... buy your own or bottle swap are the best.
Agree with sibling poster; just get argon for mild, stainless or alu. It is absolutely the standard for the tig process.
Most times gas is not an appreciable cost, usually time or materials but I guess it could be a factor if you're welding up a lot of scrap and count your time as free.
I haven't added it up but I think I spend more on grinder discs than gas :p
>Helium is found within natural gas in concentrations typically up to 1% by volume of the gas released; however, the updated reserve review shows that the latest well drilled in the Virgina project contains a concentration of almost 11%.
https://m.miningweekly.com/article/south-africa-to-become-ei...
Helium is abundant; it’s prices simply haven’t ever stayed high enough to warrant wider extraction from the gas supply. The last time we did that we produced the strategic helium reserve which has basically fed our consumption for 60 years!
Also, why is everyone measuring helium in volume (litres, cubic feet)? This is highly dependent on temperature and pressure. Why not state quantities in terms of mass?
This problem appears way more often than I'd like. In measuring gas flow through valves there's a quantity called "standard cubic feet per minute". The only problem is that there is no uniformly agreed upon standard reference temperature and pressure!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cubic_feet_per_minute
It's even worse than described on Wikipedia, as I've found at least one valve manufacturer claims that the reference pressure is the pressure they used upstream of the valve, not something near atmospheric as Wikipedia claims is typical: http://btrettel.nerfers.com/archives/72
Whenever I get a valve I either have to do my own flow tests or call the manufacturer and hope I get someone who knows a thing or two about their testing procedures.
As you said, the entire issue can be avoided by simply specifying mass or moles. I don't quite know why people don't do this, but I suppose it speaks to the power of tradition. Far too few people think about if what they are doing makes sense.
If all of the world's current electric power production were fueled by fusion, the helium produced would be a drop in the bucket compared to the total existing helium market.
17.59 MeV / (helium-4 atomic mass) = 0.117 TWh/kg
in thermal energy per kg of helium produced. The U.S. electricity production in 2019 was 4,118 TWh [1] and 4118 TWh / 0.117 (TWh/kg) = 35,196 kg.
If we assume some inefficency in the thermal->electricity conversion, I guess it should produce at least 70,000 kg/year.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
Probably because they are talking about liquefied helium.
A convention to reserve mass as the unit of sale for elements in gaseous form seems reasonable, you would want to receive a Very Large Bladder of gas when ordering supplies for an experiment that needs to be chilled with helium.
So... absolutely no recapture of this used helium? I wouldn't be throwing stones at party balloons. Seriously, the concept of helium as a disposable gas is the root of the entire price problem. Hopefully the price will rise to the point that capture and recycling become more cost effective.
>>A new, $110 000 liquefier at the University of Idaho is expected to recycle most of the helium needed for three NMR magnets, an electron paramagnetic resonance magnet, and a Mössbauer spectrometer, says Blumenfeld. As an added benefit, the new machine will enable the university to purchase its helium in gaseous form instead of liquid, for a substantial cost savings, he says.
110K? That is dirt cheap for nearly any industrial process. Industrial baking ovens can cost more. Why are such things not standard with every device needing substantial amounts of helium.
Because unlike food and family, helium is a finite resource. Once it is released into the air, it is gone. It will float up and literally into space. By protecting and conserving it now we won't have to panic once it becomes truly rare.
(Not kidding about into space. The helium in those party balloons really does leave the planet.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
Is there a need to preemptively conserve? As it becomes rarer, prices will increase which will naturally encourage conservation. At the same time, new supply will come online as they become economical due to the higher prices.
I hear this around energy most often. Oil is becoming more and more expensive ($$ and energy-wise) to extract (I find the best way to look at how many barrels of oil are extracted for the energy cost of 1 barrel). This number has been falling ever since the first well was tapped. We have used up all the "easy oil" and moving on to things like fracking which, environmental damage aside, does not have good returns and some of the major drill sites have adjusted their predicted yield down sharply (also fracking sites have a steep fall off where normal wells have more of a bell curve). The problem is: we have no viable substitute for oil (/gas). The world runs on oil.
Solar is great but you can't put it in a tank or ship across the ocean or fly and battery tech isn't really close to closing that gap. You also can't make plastic from solar energy. Not to mention converting all our cars, trucks, etc to battery-powered is not a fast or cheap process. I highly recommend watching these videos on Energy Economics [0], Peak Cheap Oil [1], and Shale Oil [2] (aka fracking).
All of this to say, I think it's dangerous to assume that we will have the time (or money) to reverse or halt the loss of non-renewable materials. Especially since if any of these start to get really expensive due to lower supply/higher demand it will kick off a number of other issues. If the price of oil spikes that affects a ton of our economy from gas, to plastics, and more.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvqEi7XRKY8&list=PLRgTUN1zz_...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uKihKkx0eY&list=PLRgTUN1zz_...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uKihKkx0eY&list=PLRgTUN1zz_...
Carbon Recycling International already operates a commercial methanol plant for making methanol using renewable electrolytic hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
This article "Process Advantages of Direct CO2 to Methanol Synthesis" has a lot of details:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fchem.2018.0044...
Methanol is a portable liquid that can be used directly as a fuel. It is also convertible to the olefins (alkenes) propylene and ethylene, the two most common plastic feedstocks. China has built millions of tons of capacity for methanol-to-olefins in the past decade, though unfortunately their input methanol is mostly produced from coal.
See e.g. this recent plant that came on stream: "World’s largest single-train methanol-to-olefins plant now operating"
https://www.chemengonline.com/worlds-largest-single-train-me...
Helium is one of the very few mineral resources that is simultaneously industrially important, scarce, difficult to substitute, and exhibits poor prospects for higher sustainable terrestrial production.
The other few elements in this small club are (IMO) the platinum group metals and rhenium.
(I'm semi-joking.)
Not directly. But what about using it for hydrogen production?
Helium is only a finite resource at this price point. We could extract harder to get to reserves, or even make our own by fusioning hydrogen, if the price was high enough.
I'm in a huge research university and I am only familiar with one group that has a liquifier and it's because they move through Helium on the kiloliter scale.
This is the tragedy of the commons for climate change all over again: individually, we profit by polluting as not doing so involves a cost; societally we win overall by changing our behaviour collectively. A helium liquefier and recovery system is exactly the sort of thing a competent departmental head should support.
1. BIG NEWS: Resource X is running out!
2. Years later: BIG NEWS: Resource X is miraculously not running out!
I'm not saying that always happens and nothing ever runs out. But it's common enough that I put these in the "I'll believe it when I see it" file.
No one ever sold a paper or a click on a "THINGS ARE PROBABLY OK!" headline.
Then dig into the numbers behind the articles which tend to be weakly sourced and full of anecdotes rather than data.
From that BBC article: > At the auction, the average price for crude helium rose a whopping 135% year-on-year as industrial users acted to boost stocks for future years.
> "It wasn't very difficult for major suppliers to pass this increase on to their customers, so it did affect worldwide pricing," says [Phil Kornbluth, the founder of Kornbluth Helium Consulting, which advises clients on commercial aspects of the global helium business, says the "price has gone up an awful lot in a short space of time"].
So there's a single source and it's someone who benefits from the price going up.
The Physics Today article has more data, but it still has too many anecdotes and could be mostly replaced by a chart of supply & demand trends over time like the one in the linked report: https://www.edisongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Heliu...
While helium is going to remain a non-renewable resource until we can mine the sun, there is no critical shortage in the immediate future.
It didn't make the headlines because "oil reserves depleted" would sound illogical while gasoline is cheap.
But we should also be aware of the possibility that those warning of doom and gloom activate people's minds to severity and risk of the problem. Because more people are aware and paying attention, we collectively take action to mitigate the risk and the worst case never happens.
A great example is our response to a pandemic. The response that creates the least amount of damage might look like a major over-reaction and people will start to question those who raised alarm with such intensity.
How do we deal with this meta problem?
...is a version of this fallacy. Rationalists probably have a name for it.
We’re only running out of helium if we’ve quit extracting fossil fuels.
Helium is a byproduct of extraction, and is most commonly vented into the atmosphere because it’s not commercially viable to process it due to its low price.
When the whole shortage made the news, I had heard that the plant was for sale, and I actually talked with my wife and joked that we could buy the plant and corner a significant portion of the Helium market. LOL! I thought it would be pretty cool to own a significant part of the production of a single element.
This would be an interesting facility to see photos of.