Helium Shortage

[Real_Wrestler]

I was watching an episode of Monster Garage on the Discovery channel when they told a factoid that, by the year 2010, at the rate we are using it, all the earth's usuable heluim will be gone, up into the upper atmosphere. I have searched this site for info -nothing. On the internet i found an article that talked about the helium shortage and the moon being a "El Dorado of helium-3". It seems to me that by 2010 we won't be minning helium on the moon, so won't the price go up?

1915 Grade A helium cost $2500 /ft3
1940 Grade A helium cost $1.5 cents /ft3
1986 -the United States Bureau of Mines set the price of grade A helium at $37.50/1000ft3 or about $0.38/ft3.

Recently Congress has passed "The Helium Privatization Act" in which the government will start to sell of the federal helium reserve to private companies,Completely by 2018, but with 2 years supply still in the reserve each year before.
so the governement won't have a reserve, and there will be a shortage. Simple Supply and Demand tells me that the price will go up. But how much?

well, the government itself usues a lot of helium, NASA. Almost all of steel-product manufature that deals with welding uses arc welding, where helium is commonly used as an Inert gas shield.Helium is also used as a protective gas in growing silicon & Germanium crystals for electronic use and development. These last three uses are a very high demand for helium.

If the cost now is 0.38$ /ft3, and over the course of the next two years I baught 2000.00$ worth of stock in a helium production company, and the price of Grade A Helium rose to 10.00$/ft3 , I would have around 52000.00$.
If it went up to 100.00$ /ft3, i would have half a million dollars.......
do you guys think it will rise, what do you think about the proposed "shortage" that is coming?
Here (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html)

[megalomania]

I suppose the first thing people will have to do is reduce-reuse-recycle, the mantra of conservation. It does seem odd that an inert gas that for all intents and purposes is never consumed in any way can be dissappearing. Although I am sure increased demand is taking more and more of it out of the air.

For the childrens sake we must protect our helium! What will they do without floaty balloons? This is another trick of terrorists and child molesters. All helium belonges to America! For the sake of freedom and democracy we must invade Nepal now to build a helium plant on Mt. Everest.

...Oh wait, it turns out helium really does belong to America. Almost all the worlds helium is mined from a natural gas deposit around Amarillo Texas and it is running dry. Helium also naturally migrates away from the earth because gravity is not strong enough to keep it in. I guess we're screwed.

The welders will have to find something else. Why can't they use argon or neon instead? Same with other uses of inert atmosphere. Better technology will have to reduce our dependance on the superior cooling properties of helium. Hopefully higher temperature superconductors can be developed for NMR equipment. And of course no more balloons.

[Flake2m]

I have a completely off topic question?
How the hell do you mine Helium anyway?
I know you can extract it out of the atmosphere because it is such a light gas.

[Real_Wrestler]

Well when i said minning i ment that they have to drill a well, helium naturally occurs within natural gas wells. That is curently how we get most of our helium, it is easy to extract "crude" helium from natural gas, and then refine it to Grade A.

[Jome skanish]

...and the helium gets there from beneith, it's actually slowed-down alpha particles. Thats why 99.999% of all earthly helium is He-4, while helium in the sun or in the atmospheres of the heavy planets is 99.999& He-3.

He-3 can be converted into H-3, tritium (a must have in future fusion reactors) by neutron bombardment (n+He3-->H3+p), thats why lunar mining has been proposed as an approach to get hold of valuable He-3. I'd say He-3 balloons would be quite expensive if the He3 is mined out of the moon crust :)

[Marvin]

Flake2m,
As megalomania has said, the earths gravity isnt strong enough to retain helium (or hydrogen) gas. It can retain nitrogen, oxygen, argon etc. Consequently there is very little in the air and it is not worth extracting it.

Virtually all of the worlds helium 3 in use is a result of tritium made in reactors undergoing beta decay. When you consider that, mining the moon for helium 3 doesnt seem like such a bad idea.

[Jetex Kid]

Possibly some here don't know that helium is created by the radioactive decay of radium, creating helium and radon. Sometimes the helium is trapped by an impermeable (deep) geological structure.

In the dark ages the US kept a Strategic Supply of materials, including helium which was stored in a large cave which apparently contained it satisfactorily. At the time it was said that the US was the world's only significant source of helium.

MIG welding could become prohibitively expensive without helium.

At STP, molecular velocity of N2 and O2 is about 1,100 f/s. Equipartition of energy in a gas requires that helium have a molecular velocity of about 2,900 f/s, which is way short of escaping earth's gravity. It's up there somewhere, Marvin.

[Cyclonite]

Helium is a major byproduct of oil refining operations, seems odd that it would come to a shortage. Its also the 2nd most abundant element in the universe (I think).

[nbk2000]

Helium is also essential as a cooling gas in high-pressure "pebble" nuclear reactors.

Might be worth investing now in stock in helium wells or refiners or whatever, or stealing tanks of the stuff, because it's nearly impossible to extract from the air (cost) and is too essential to do without, so what's left will become incredibly expensive as it'll be used for aerospace/nuclear/science applications where nothing else cheaper will do.

Supply and demand. God bless capitalism. :D

[Bugger]

I am sure that substitutes can be found for helium in most of its uses. MIG welding and aluminium welding and silicon refining can just as well be done under argon (instead of helium), which for all practical purposes is just as inert, and constitutes 1% of the atmosphere from which it can be extracted by liquefaction/distillation. All unmanned balloons, including party balloons, can be inflated with hydrogen instead of helium, with proper precautions taken against its flammability. Alternatively, hot air, heated with burners, could be used.

A possible non-flammable buoyancy gas substitute for helium would be neon, also extractable from the atmosphere, although with an atomic weight of 20 compared to the average 29 for air its bouyancy is much less than helium (atomic weight 4). But having to use neon instead of helium would be an enormous obstacle to revival of airships.

[Marvin]

Jetex Kid, (Presumably a Fox kid in the process of rebranding to something less culture specific?)

Not entirly wrong. The earths surface isnt where the action happens though, by their nature gas molecules diffuse all over the atmosphere and have a tiny collision distance on the surface. The point where the action happens is where a molecule in the atmosphere has a significant chance of escape without hitting anything else. About 500km up we are a long way from STP. Its hot for a start and if you run the math you end up with a number thats still short of escape velocity from the 500km mark. Equipartition of course is avarage energy, and so a proportion of those molecules do have escape velocity and do escape.

This is intrinsically true for earth because if it wernt, helium being the 2nd most common element in the universe, we'd have large amounts in the atmosphere. Uranus has about twice the escape velocity of earth (its colder too so its not a completely fair comparison) has an atmosphere thats about 98% hydrogen and helium.

Ra ==> Rn + He is also true but why fixate on radium? To get to radium from a parent like uranium 238 youve allready produced three times the helium and you get 3 or 4 times the helium following the decay of the radium daughters.

JohnW,

Helium is much more expensive than argon, if they use helium for certain types of welding I would think they have a very good reason. It might have to do with ionisation potentials. Adding helium to a low pressure discharge does not much affect the properties of the arc aside from raising overall pressure.

[Davo]

MIG welding could become prohibitively expensive without helium.


Actually, alot of MIG welding IS ALREADY done with argon gas as the welding shield. In fact any inert gas can be used, not necessarily helium. Where i live most people use argon for welding, probably because its cheaper than helium. I think it depends on simple supply and demand economics as for which gas is used. If helium is more abundant/cheaper than argon then He is used, otherwise argon is used.

[nbk2000]

Let's not forget the superior heat conductivity of helium to any other gas.

Ammonia has been used for blimps, and would be far cheaper and more efficient than anything (other than hydrogen), but couldn't be used for party balloons because of the toxic nature of the gas.

For party balloons, hydrogen would be good, 'cut' with nitrogen or such to make it less flammable, as some kid will, inevitably, put a flame to one and singe off his eyebrows, resulting in an immediate ban on the 'criminal element' (:D) known as hydrogen. :p

[Real_Wrestler]

Supposedly helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, Kinda weird considsering our atmosphere contains only about 0.0005% Helium. Becuase it isn't gravitationaly grounded in our atmoshpere we do loose helium into space.Here (http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele002.html)
Knowing now that there will be a shortage and learning of Argon's use makes me re-think my plans to invest a lot of money into Helium companies. There is enough Argon in our atmoshpere worth extracting it. about 0.94% of our atmosphere is Argon. I read that it is extracted by fractional distilation. I also learned Argon can be substituted for helium in many of Helium's applications, This is way i was wondering if when helium runs low, can argon be used for everything instead? It seems that it can for such things as welding and growing silicon & Germanium crystals.
But then i asked myself, well this would increase the demand for Argon right? So the price for argon will likely rise.
Well right now argon is around $0.50/100g.
Should I invest in Argon instead?Here (http://www.scescape.net/~woods/elements/argon.html)

[Marvin]

nbk, good point about heat conductivity, apart from possibly hydrogen but this often isnt suitable.

Davo, I too was under the impression that MIG welding was done mostly with Argon or Argon/CO2 mixtures. Its more likley Jetex meant TIG welding, which more often uses Argon/Helium mixtures (or pure argon for very thin metal) and pure helium for thick metals/higher temperatures.

RW, I can think of nowhere on planet earth where helium would be less expensive than argon. I would doubt the price of argon will go up much, its virtually a byproduct of liquid nitrogen production. Investing in Helium might not be so useful either as its only going to go up once and its very hard to even guess when it will run out. If it takes five years to start moving and then doubles over the next five you'd still have been better investing in something else. One thing is for sure, when it does start to run out the producers will be lying through their teeth about remaining stocks until the very last moments. Unless you have an inside source at a major producer, I'd leave this.

[nbk2000]

Nuclear power plants!

Argon can't be substituted for helium in pebble-bed reactors, as it doesn't have the heat conductive properties needed.

Nor can hydrogen because of the 'hydrogen-embrittlement' problem, aside from the heat conductivity issue.

As the US continues to go nuclear for its warships and subs, helium will be essential.

50 years ago, ivory/teak/ebony/tiger penis's/black rhino horns, were common as dirt.

Now, you'd be hard pressed to find any for less than a small fortune.

And, in 50 years, you won't be able to buy any at any price because it'll all be extinct and those who have any can command a kings ransom for it.

Extinction is good for capitalists who plan for the long-term. :)

What better way to come out of the freezer than with a couple of rhino horns and a teak tree tucked away in a sealed cave in the antarctic somewhere? With them having been extinct for probably a century, one horn alone would probably be worth a small city to the chinese.

'Course, there's always the risk that technology could duplicate the needed materials via nano-tech, but that'd be 'artifical', compared to the genuine article you'd have. I'm sure people would pay for the difference.

[shooter3]

Helium is essencial in the short term(for nuclear power). In the long term, nukes will have to be of the breeder type (nfr's). These only use small amounts of helium. They also burn up their own waste, mostly getting rid of the waste storage problem.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/index.html

[Pb1]

No one has mentioned the largest use of helium yet: pressurising liquid hydrogen tanks in rockets. Because liquid hydrogen is so cold, helium is needed to pressurize the tanks, as it is the only gas at that temperature. Due to beuracracy and government inefficiency, the same designs that NASA uses today will likely be used in the future, creating a constant demand for the stuff.

[Bugger]

There does not seem to be any reason why Ar could not be used instead of He for welding of reactive metals (where reaction with O2 or N2 is likely) - except possibly cost, if it is substantially cheaper to obtain He from Texas natural gas than to obtain the same volume of Ar from fractional distillation of liquid air (along with N2 and O2). The only genuine chemical compounds it forms are HArF and ArF2, obtained by irradiation with short UV light at low temperatures of a clathrate containing Ar embedded in frozen HF. Of course, Ar cannot be used for buoyancy applications instead of He, only hot air or H2 or Ne being usable; or for very-low-temperature refrigeration requiring He or H2 on account of their low boiling-points.

[tag]

Getting an offshore bank account isn't as difficult as some may think, running a quick search on google you'll find dozens of websites offering offshore bank accounts and more services for a pretty large fee most of the time. I've been researching this for about a year for my self and already have an account setup which is simply a number with no name attached. Some of the first notable areas of offshore accounts were Swiss banks and the Caymans. After looking into this for so long I realized all these companies are offering services you can get for hundreds less in some cases if you just look a little harder and contact the places your self. For example if you wanted an IBC in the Caribbean and ran a search for offshore corporation you'll find sites offering them for $1500+ depending on where it's setup, the same goes for bank accounts. The easiest way to get an offshore bank account or company setup is to run searches for banks in the country you want to get the account at. I suggest browsing every single banks website and see if they have information on opening an account or setting up an IBC you should eventually find one, you should also still e-mail each bank asking if they offer any IBC services or can open accounts for people outside their country. Most will be happy to offer you an account even if they don't offer any IBC services. For most personal offshore accounts a copy of your passport, the minimum opening deposit and application is needed. No SSN# or other private information is needed and if you want to be extra private you can simply photoshop your passport, your picture name address and all other information can be changed, however they may need an address to send some paperwork to you but getting a mail drop in the US is easy enough. Some banks allow you to even open corporate accounts with as little as a DBA certificate, you'll need to specifically ask about this as some will want you to have an IBC from that country others will not care as long as your fully incorporated. Banks usually don't ask why you want the account they are more than happy to have another customer regardless of their physical location. The biggest benefit of having an offshore accounts is, the ability to accept a wire transfers from anyone and not have it show up in a US account, you can usually deposit checks/money orders into these accounts by mailing them to the bank. You should have online access to perform outgoing wires to send money to anyone in the world. Using a debit card you can withdraw money anywhere you are and its pretty anonymous since you can pick any ATM. Some banks are setup to do all of the above plus accept western union, e-gold and other payment methods, usually these types of banks will take a small percentage from any deposit. I personally rather keep cash hidden at home then keep it in these banks, i'd keep their minimum required amount in them in case there are any fees, maybe a little extra. If you run any online business they are great to have as another payment method for your customers even for anything offline. Don't get caught up using any middle man company for IBC's or Bank accounts these are two very simple things you can get and much cheaper on your own by going through the banks directly. You have the option to be as anonymous as you want with them or even just use your real name and info its up to you. It's a waste to use any of the middle man websites for most of the services they offer so hopefully if anyone ever needs one of these services this saves you some money. Also I just remembered most banks will not need any upfront payments for an IBC you can fill out the application send all supporting documents and only after accepted will you need to send the fee's, the same goes for the bank accounts usually you apply first and when accepted you send the opening deposit.

[futuredictator]

Hello, I know this post is quite old, but does anyone know of how to invest in elements and raw materials?

[megalomania]

You mean like commodities investments where people buy oranges, milk, and gold? Good question... sounds like a financially oriented website or a brokerage firm would be a place to start asking that kind of question.

I prefer to keep my money safe and sound with the credit card companies, and in the bank earning 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 001% interest. I'll have my first million soon.

[Bugger]

To get back to the real subject of this thread: it seems to me that most of the wastage which looks liable to create a shortage of He by 2010 (at least that extracted from Texas natural gas wells, which are in sedimentary rocks derived from granite which contains U-232, Th-232, K-40, and some rare-earth metal isotopes which decay mostly by successive alpha-particle decay giving He-4) is because of the use of it for frivolous purposes such as party balloons, unmanned dirigibles and blimps, weather balloons, etc.. There are also other applications such as inert-gas welding and pressurized hermetic storage of substances for which Ar, or failing that Ne (if reactivity with N2 or CO2 is a problem), can substitute.

For such purposes, at least where carriage of passengers is not involved, H2 (which can be simply produced by electrolysis of aqueous solutions of salts) would be a much cheaper and infinitely more abundant substitute. Having a molecular weight of 2, compared to 4 for He (and compared to about 29 for air), it gives better buoyancy than He. The only problem that has to be dealt with is the flammability of H2, and its formation of explosive mixtures with air if in sufficient concentration, but gas-handling and materials technology should be quite sufficiently advanced to prevent any likelihood of leakage, similarly to natural gas. As the result, it may even be possible now to contemplate having again passenger- or cargo-carrying airships filled with H2, as formerly used until the 1930s, and which are much more fuel-efficient than heavier-than-air aircraft (which are faster, but have to overcome substantial air resistance, and constantly expend energy just to stay aloft). This will also be necessary as the result of likely liquid fuel shortages later this century. Helicopters would be the type of aircraft that could most obviously be replaced by such airships, which can hover and lift vertically.

Because of the small concentration of He in air, due to most of that produced as He-4 by decay of mostly U-238 and Th-232 and K-40 and some rare-earth metals being eventually lost to outer space through diffusion at speeds exceeding escape velocity, extracting it by fractional distillation of air, as the final gaseous residue, would be costly. The only other inert gas that could substitute for He or H2 as a buoyancy gas is Ne, but because it has a molecular weight of 20, compared to the average of about 29 for air, the buoyancy it can produce is much less. Ne is also quite rare in the atmosphere.