Helium is also critical for scuba diving in the 200' to 1,000' depths. Currently, the most affordable, safest, and most common way to conduct these dives is with open-circuit systems, where every breath is taken from the tank and exhausted into the sea where it bubbles away.
A common mix is 21/35 (21% Oxygen, 35% Helium, the remainder almost entirely Nitrogen). Divers often use such mixes for dives in the 165 foot range. At that depth, a fit diver consumes a little over three cubic feet of gas per minute, which means that a little over one cubic foot of Helium is lost forever into the atmosphere each minute per diver.
An alternative is a closed-circuit or rebreather system, where the exhaust gas is scrubbed of carbon dioxide and fresh oxygen added to replace the oxygen metabolized by the diver. Such systems are far more complicated, more expensive, and require much more training to dive safely.
But one of the advantages of closed-circuit diving is that the inert gases (including Helium) are not exhausted with every breath. Therefore, it doesn't matter how many minutes a dive takes, Helium is not being exhausted into the water with every breath. This makes for a substantial savings in cost per dive and saves a non-renewable resource.
As Helium prices rise, I hop there will be an economic incentive for divers to take up closed-circuit diving, which will in turn lead to the development of simpler, cheaper and safer systems.
Helium prices are already high outside the US, yet no one has produced a closed-circuit system with acceptable safety. No matter what kind of controls and alarms they build in it's too easy to end up without enough oxygen in the loop. A friend of a friend died here in the northeast Pacific not long ago because he just forgot to turn on the valve, and didn't realize what happened before he passed out.
In the long run I expect we'll end up with more semi-closed systems. They're a little less efficient but inherently safer. Something like this http://www.halcyon.net/?q=node/44 could probably be mass produced at a reasonable price (expensive now due to custom manufacturing).
I have been reading about the pending helium shortage for the last 10 years (for example: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html). That WIRED article gave us 10 - 25 years. The Seed article gives us 10 - 15 from today.
I never know what to think of these things, given that we have been "running out of oil" since the late 1970's. I suspect, just as with oil, that there is no economic incentive for anyone to go looking for new supply while the price is so low. Once it gets high enough, someone is going to figure out some crazy way to extract it.
FWIW we've been running out of oil for even longer than that: "In 1919 United States Geological Survey (USGS) head George Otis Smith even predicted that the nation would be out of oil in nine years." http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/05/0520_040520_...
It looks like US reserve growth is declining even when accounting for all the offshore stuff discovered in the last 30 years. So we're not finding as much as we used to.
Edit: Sorry, I misread your question at first. "Peak oil" refers to peak production. We know we passed this in the continental US in 1971. That's only knowable after the fact, of course.
From what I've read about the peak oil phenomenon, it seems like sort of a coincidence that peak production happens around the same time half the oil in an oil well (or oil field, or oil producing region) is exhausted. So that's how people try to predict future peak oil events.
The problem is that proven reserves are a moving target. (Though we know the growth of reserves is trending down for the US.) And it's harder still to know much about the rest of the world's reserves since oil reserves are regarded by many nations as state secrets.
Right now a 500 L dewar of liquid He costs about $500 USD. (more for some locations in EU) You can already buy regenerators that capture the boiled off LHe and this can save a good amount of money with some suppliers. If Helium becomes more scarce this type of technology will become much more common.
A larger concern is the scarcity of He3 - This has become very expensive in Europe due to the US's crazy ambition to install thousands of He3 based detectors for people smuggling nuclear bombs into the USA. See http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2549/he-3-and-homeland-securi... for more info. Like other posters I don't understand why the Russians don't step up!
I fail to see the argument here, Neon is readily within peoples price range and is almost exclusively provided by cryogenic fractal distillation. It costs approximately $33/100g and helium presently costs $5.2/100g. Considering the existing neon producers will only have to modify their equipment slightly I doubt the price of helium would ever surpass the price of neon in the foreseeable future.
I found a big tank of helium in the pile of junk at the house I moved into about a year ago and ended up giving it away since I had no use for it (after making a ton of party balloons).
I guess I should have kept the tank and retired after purchasing a private island in the Caribbean...
If exponential progress of technology had kept up, we would have been getting Helium and all sorts of minerals from the Moon since 12 years ago. Oh... And I would be flying my car to work.
Sadly, technology goes by leaps and bounds, subject to the winds of politics and economics.
It's not impossible that, 12 years from now, we will be living in a post-societal-collapse agrarian society and our achievements will be little more than legends.
It's not impossible that, 12 years from now, we will be living in a post-societal-collapse agrarian society and our achievements will be little more than legends.
Well, I guess that's one way to match the demand and supply of helium.
But hey, at least we have social networks and the web .. and hundreds of new ways to sell products and advertise those products, so clearly technology is keeping up to society's needs!!!
Estimated selling prices for lunar He3 are around $6-10 million per kg (with the commercial viability of even that figure being pretty optimistic), so I'm going to go with 'no'.
The moon has helium? It sounds like it comes from alpha-decay of radioactive elements and I don't think the moon has much of that given its size, no iron core and all. But I'm not a planetary scientist...
I recall that one of the reasons frequently given for returning to the moon is that it is "rich" in Helium-3 (the commonest isotope is Helium-4) and it can be used in nuclear fusion[1].
If wikipedia is to be believed "rich" is relative here and corresponds to 0.01 ppm. He-4 is slightly better at 28 ppm. However as He-4 is 5ppm [2] of the atmosphere here on Earth the Moon seems a long way to go to achieve just a 6-fold enrichment.
Helium-3 is also extremely useful when it comes to cryogenics. Since it is 25% lighter than Helium-4, it is easier to boil it off to reach temperatures below 1 degree K. In the systems that use Helium-3 it's usually a closed circuit system and loss of helium is considered to be a big deal since it's expensive.
Actually, the helium in the solar wind is not the helium the Sun has made, it's primordial. The helium made by the Sun is in the core and does not get to the surface, because the Sun's convective layer does not reach into the part where fusion is happening.
Right now we get helium by distilling it out of natural gas, which means that we only tap a tiny fraction of what's actually present on and in the planet. And although right now we're using helium faster than we can extract it from the dwindling supply of natural gas, that doesn't preclude the development of other methods and sources in the future (and, once the supply is low enough and the demand is high enough, somebody will put up the money to figure it out).
I work for a company that makes it more efficient and safer to throw away natural gas. It's nowhere near as rare as you think, in fact, in drilling, it's considered a nuisance more than a product of the well. It's like saying we have a dwindling supply of mud.
At one point, oil companies actually gave it away for free.
The moon, solar winds, nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, the lithosphere, other planets, local sources.
Currently the easiest way to get it is as a byproduct of natural gas drilling. But the planet has been outgassing it for, geologically, a very long time. The low hanging fruit might be running low but if there is a demand it for then there will be someone willing to sell it to you.
Well, we would have, but we made the extraordinarily shortsighted decision to sell off our helium reserve when there was stuff a lot of it around.
If we'd sat on it for a few more decades, we would have been in much better shape (and our scientific industry would have benefited relative to the rest of the world), but the opportunity to do so has probably passed.
Tritium is produced by fission reactors, tritium decays into an isotope of helium.
So i think this is different from oil where oil can't really be produced.
I'm not saying we should crap all of our helium away, but I'm having a hard time being concerned about something that we can at least hypothetically produce.
Who says oil can't be produced? I mean, it doesn't make sense to use it as a fuel source since you'd have to put in at least as much energy as you'd be getting back out, but you can still produce it.
Reading about Helium on Wikipedia, I get the impression that it's far from as rare - neither in natural occurance nor in natural or artificial production - as this article would like to suggest.
"In the Earth's heterosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere, helium and other lighter gases are the most abundant elements."
"In this way an estimated 3000 metric tons of helium are generated per year throughout the lithosphere."
And as both Wiki and the article points out, the biggest "reserve" is found in natural gas - which Europe, with Russia in particular, has vast abundances of. Not sure with what concentration our European gas deposits hold Helium, though.
I'm not sure which source to trust here on the topic of Helium being this rare.
Well, "most abundant" in the heterosphere doesn't really say much given that the density at those altitudes is sufficiently low that the molecules have a large mean free path. We're basically talking satellite orbit altitudes here, so it would be seriously difficult to haul something large enough to gather enough mass to be useful. Certainly it wouldn't be cheap.
And 3000 tons per year is not that much given that Wikipedia says "2008 world helium total production of about 32 million kg helium", ie 32000 metric tons. In other words, demand exceeds production by a factor of 10, even if (and that's a big if) all of the He in the lithosphere could be captured.
No, I think the solution is to go to Jupiter and scoop up a huge load of it (gotta be Jupiter, Saturn's atmosphere is deficient in He). And given that we need it for spaceflight, better do it before we use it all up!
The problem with He is also why it's so useful--it doesn't react with anything. It's a bitch to filter because the only strategy you have is to get rid of everything else.
A common mix is 21/35 (21% Oxygen, 35% Helium, the remainder almost entirely Nitrogen). Divers often use such mixes for dives in the 165 foot range. At that depth, a fit diver consumes a little over three cubic feet of gas per minute, which means that a little over one cubic foot of Helium is lost forever into the atmosphere each minute per diver.
An alternative is a closed-circuit or rebreather system, where the exhaust gas is scrubbed of carbon dioxide and fresh oxygen added to replace the oxygen metabolized by the diver. Such systems are far more complicated, more expensive, and require much more training to dive safely.
But one of the advantages of closed-circuit diving is that the inert gases (including Helium) are not exhausted with every breath. Therefore, it doesn't matter how many minutes a dive takes, Helium is not being exhausted into the water with every breath. This makes for a substantial savings in cost per dive and saves a non-renewable resource.
As Helium prices rise, I hop there will be an economic incentive for divers to take up closed-circuit diving, which will in turn lead to the development of simpler, cheaper and safer systems.