Party City is closing down stores, and this is all the excuse some need to start panicking over a supposed helium shortage again. Parties, children, and helium balloons are not something I’ve ever really understood. Don’t kids have squeaky voices already?
But everything is an excuse now to insist that we’re about to run out of everything, that modern civilization cannot continue, appetites must be curbed, recycle everything, and walk more lightly upon this Earth. One problem with this is that we’re not running out of stuff, something I really did write the book on (Hey, it’s free, why not?). The other is that helium is absolutely the worst possible example you could use to illustrate that contention anyway.
Helium is the only stable element we actually use that is being continually generated here on Earth. It’s the end product of the radioactive breakdown of uranium and thorium, and as such we’re not going to run out of it until we run out of them — which will be several billion years after the sun goes red giant and fries us all anyway. All of the planet’s original allocation of helium flew away into space billions of years back (it’s very light, as those balloons tell us) and all that we’ve got now has come from that radioactive decay.
Very serious and very learned chin-stroking goes on about how we’re going to be short of helium, we must recycle it all, civilization is damned (or at least won’t have MRIs, one use of the gas) if we don’t and all that. It’s rare (a noble exception here at National Geographic) to find even a hint of where we get it from.
The underlying problem about the shortage scare being that people don’t understand what a mineral reserve is, and reserves of helium are indeed very small. The belief is that a reserve is what there is for us to use. Nope — a reserve is what we’ve prepared for us to use. We’ve proven that we can collect it, using current technology, at current prices, and make a profit from doing so. How much we could use, how much we can turn into a mineral reserve, is an entirely different question.
Helium is a renewable. Certainly, there’s a limit to how much we can use today, but by tomorrow Gaia will have made some more for us.
It is possible that we’re using more than is being generated, or more than we can usefully extract. That would be bad, because helium is liquid down to just under a degree above absolute zero, and that means it’s very useful indeed in science, medicine, and so on. Stick something in a bath of liquid helium and we can do all sorts of fun and interesting stuff. Those MRI machines detecting granny’s cancer (or mine soon enough, given my age) are only part of it.
Most certainly, given that helium is really useful, we’d like to have more of it around. Fortunately, we’ve already done something about exactly that. Fracking for natural gas is a part of it, creating a global liquefied natural gas market is another. The two are connected, for gas is a horrible thing to try to ship intercontinental distances by pipeline. Thus, we cool it down to a liquid and stick it on ships that way.
Which is also, by happenstance, how we extract helium. That new gas being created by the death of thorium atoms often enough ends up in natural gas reservoirs and for the same reason the gas itself is there – the rock above won’t let it out. So, we drill down into those reservoirs, stick a straw in (or frack rocks containing the stuff) and we get it.
But recall above? Helium has a very low freezing temperature. It also has a very low liquefaction temperature — it’s a gas until minus 265 degrees Celsius or so. There’s also not much of it in that gas we’re about to use to cook with. This leaves us with a technical problem. To separate gases you cool them. The ones with the higher liquefaction temperatures, logically enough, become liquids first and you can drain them off the bottom of the tank. Carry on cooling and, akin to distillation, you can get any fraction of the original mixture you want.
But there’s not much helium there, and it’s worth less than trying to cool all that butane, propane, methane, and so on. So if we’re going to pipeline it to somewhere to burn it, we don’t bother to extract our helium and it ends up floating up the chimney of wherever and being lost. So, now we have an LNG industry, what are we doing? On a global scale we’re cooling mass amounts of those butanes, propanes, and methanes, leaving our helium in the little bit left over, where it’s much more concentrated. Stick the right little doohickey on the side of an LNG plant and we can, at very reasonable prices indeed, gain all the helium we want to use.
This is exactly how many of these new LNG plants are being built. That is, the possible shortage of helium has already been solved.
We’re just waiting for Joe and Bob, the construction workers, to finish bolting the plants together and we’re done.
Helium is a renewable resource, so it’s actually the worst example to use of our running out of elements or minerals. Even the problem of collecting enough of it has already been solved courtesy of the fracking revolution. It’s fun to think that we’ve got to keep fracking so that we don’t run out of helium to keep the MRI machines running.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
