Krypton is rarer in the atmosphere than helium (by molar/volume concentration), though more abundant by mass. Krypton is commercially produced by atmospheric separation. I would therefore expect helium sourced by air separation to cost roughly 1/4-1/5 the cost of krypton production, per liter, or 4-5 times as much per gram. A quick search on Google shows krypton at 65 cents per liter in the early 2000s (according to an article about windowpane gas filling). An Alibaba search indicates that 10-15 cents per liter may be more typical now.
If those krypton prices are accurate, and I haven't made any major mistakes with my helium ballparking, I would expect that applications like helium filled hard drives would see only a tiny cost increase should they be forced to use helium separated from the atmosphere. I think that most cryogenic cooling applications would have to move to closed-cycle reuse of helium. I don't know about welding and leak testing.
EDIT: "The Energy-Related Applications of Helium", 1980 report from Los Alamos National Laboratory, specifically considers helium production from atmospheric separation and from lean natural gas streams in section X.
A.W. Francis has discussed the recovery of helium from the atmosphere by conventional methods. He predicts that, for helium produced from the atmosphere as a by-product from air separation plants, the cost would lie in the range of $200 to $300 per Mcf in 1973 dollars (over ten times present
cost).
...
To go further and separate helium by similar techniques but with helium as the primary product would raise the cost by more than another order of magnitude to about $7000 Mcf in 1980 dollars.
Apparently one Mcf is 28,317 liters in SI units. That's 24.7 cents per liter of helium from the atmosphere in 1980 dollars, or 80 cents per liter in CPI-adjusted 2018 dollars.
Krypton is relatively cheap because, while it is produced by atmospheric distillation, it is a by-product of oxygen/nitrogen production. The boiling point of oxygen is -183 °C, and the boiling point of krypton is -153 °C. This means that when you distill air and obtain liquid oxygen, krypton will necessarily also be obtained as a liquid.
Helium, however, has the very low boiling point of -267 °C. Commercial, high-scale production of oxygen doesn't even approach this temperature, so helium will never be distilled and instead be vented as a gas along with a residual air stream.
The point is that the price of krypton is actually the marginal cost of producing it from an existing process, while the price of helium will approach the cost of energy required to extract it, which can be calculated and is quite high.
Those are good points. The report from LANL that I edited in after my original rough estimate mentions these issues too. It estimates an electricity requirement of about 170,000 kWh to produce one Mcf (28,317 liters) of helium by atmospheric separation in a dedicated plant. The cost of electricity dominates the overall process cost for helium production via atmospheric separation. In the state with the cheapest industrial electricity, Washington, it would cost nearly 27 cents per liter of helium for the electricity alone.
I've got a really dumb question that maybe you can answer. Keep in mind the last time I was in a chemistry class was 10th grade (half my life ago)...
How is the boiling point of any of these elements determined? I cant imagine that we got some helium in its gaseous form and cooled it down below -267 degrees and then heated it up slowly to find out. Is there something about it's atomic makeup that allows that number to just be calculated? Thanks.
No one really answered your question so I'll give it a shot.
Increasing the pressure on a gas increases it's boiling point. If you have a lot of pure helium gas and a really good compressor you can increase the pressure until the boiling point is high enough to exceed the temperature of the gas, so now you have a liquid helium at an insane pressure.
Next, drop the pressure and stick a thermometer into the liquid. When you hit atmospheric pressure the liquid will be boiling, but boiling liquids don't exceed their boiling point/temperature so helium is going to be waaay cold.
You can see this yourself: take a can of dust off or butane, turn it upside down and spray a bit into a shot glass (do not drink or breathe, super toxic). Instead of an aerosol spray a liquid will come out and begin to boil in the process making the glass super cold...
So, what's happening here you may wonder? It's chemistry/physics in action. When a pot of water boils on your stove it takes the heat energy from the burner and uses it to change states from liquid to gas. If you pour liquid water onto a piece of hot metal it turns into steam (boiling) while cooling off the metal (removing heat).
So when you take any liquid and rapidly raise it above it's boiling point (due to pressure or temperature changes) it will lower the temperature around it in order to obtain the energy it needs to change states.
All that being said, compressed helium is the most abundant means of cooling for low-temperature purposes because of these properties.
By boiling compressed helium at room temperature and pressure we can make something that super cold -267 degrees, at least while the helium continues to boil.
> If you have a lot of pure helium gas and a really good compressor you can increase the pressure until the boiling point is high enough to exceed the temperature of the gas, so now you have a liquid helium at an insane pressure.
The critical temperature of Helium is 9.35 °R -- above that it will not be a liquid at any pressure. So we have to go through successive phases of compression (which heats it up), cooling via another cryogen (liquid nitrogen initially, then liquid hydrogen in subsequent passes), and expansion (at the right conditions, because of the oddities of the Joule-Thompson effect[0] for elements like Helium), in order to cool it enough to produce a liquid.
> How is the boiling point of any of these elements determined? I cant imagine that we got some helium in its gaseous form and cooled it down below -267 degrees and then heated it up slowly to find out.
Why not? That's relatively easy to do in any moderately equipped physics lab.
A lot of these macroscopic features of things are really, really hard to work out from microscopic details from first principles. Things like why is coal black, water wet, etc? Not a stupid question at all.
This is a hugely flawed analysis. Noble gases are extracted from air through liquefaction, which requires dropping the temperature of air to the point where certain component gases are liquid, allowing them to be separated off.
Krypton has a boiling point of 120 Kelvin, far higher than even Oxygen (90 K) or Nitrogen (77 K), making it trivial to extract Krypton at low cost from the atmosphere in any air liquefaction facility also set up to separate Oxygen and Nitrogen (which is basically all of them). Helium, however, boils at 4 Kelvin. It is not merely cryogenic, it is super cryogenic, and it can only be separated from air via liquefaction at extremely low temperatures.
Instead, the method that is actually used to produce almost all Helium is to use natural gas (which contains as much as 7% Helium) and then separate out all of the stuff that isn't Helium (starting with the hydrocarbons, of course). This makes it possible to produce 99.995% pure "grade-A" Helium fairly cost effectively. Every cubic meter of natural gas processed could yield up to 70 liters of grade-A Helium. Compare that to processing air, where every cubic meter of air processed would yield just 5 milliliters of low grade Helium. And Helium isn't valuable enough to simply run those plants and throw away the other gases produced.
By some estimates, if all of the Neon production facilities were modified to produce Helium as well then we might be able to meet 1/1000th of the world's Helium demand, so this is not a near-term solution to the problem, even if it might be able to produce the gas inexpensively.
Naively, couldn't you extract helium by liquifying everything else and taking the leftover gas? So instead of cooling to 4 kelvin, cool to the boiling point of the element with the 2nd lowest boiling temperature. Or is that not helpful because that happens to be very low too?
Even further, shouldn't it only be necessary to liquefy down to Nitrogen, which should leave some gas that has a very high percentage of helium, and then use the same method that's used in separation of natural gas and Helium?
The difference is liquifying "to the boiling point of the element with the 2nd lowest boiling temperature" (likely Neon @ 27K) and "liquifying down to Nitrogen" (77K).
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-gas_processing , the helium is recovered from natural gas during the phase in which nitrogen is removed. Natural gas has very different content compared to the atmosphere.
Let's also note that even ignoring the specific details of the process, what you're proposing is to use a pipeline which produces helium as a side effect of its intended use of producing methane, and which is usually run on a mixture of gases that is 1% or more helium, and apply it to a mixture of gases which will produce no methane and is 0.0005% helium. The helium is nearly worthless and there's barely any to harvest in the first place; there is no possible way for this to be economical.
Well, the idea is to produce Helium as a by-product of producing liquid nitrogen. But indeed, the numbers may not work out:
About 8 million tons of liquid nitrogen is produced per year, growing 5% every year [1], largely from Cryogenic distillation. By mass, the ratio of Nitrogen and Helium in air is about 1e6 [2]. So that means, about 8 tons would be produced, which is 3.5 orders of magnitude away from the current size of the market (like 30 thousand tons). But it may be possible to use non-cryogenic processes [3] to increase the ratio of Helium in the air before separating out the nitrogen. So between the increase of the nitrogen market, the decrease in demand if Helium gets more expensive when traditional sources run out, and better processes, this means that Helium will likely continue to be available for very valuable use cases almost indefinitely.
Yes, that's how you could do it by modifying liquefaction plants that can produce Neon. In theory, you could take the leftovers after separating out Neon and you'd have a small amount of Helium. As I mentioned, at 5 ppm that doesn't give you much Helium, and you still need to purify it.
That seems relatively straightforward to solve chemically. Hydrogen can be adsorbed by many different materials. Or you could add just the right amount of oxygen to burn the hydrogen and then condense the water out.
Couldn't this also be done for the other reactive components (especially nitrogen and oxygen) before cooling the gas? Removing ~99% of the mass ahead of time would require that much less energy for cooling.
Liquid oxygen and nitrogen both have some commercial value.
The tricky but is the liquidation process only liquifies some small fraction of the gas. The rest remains as a gas, so you now have "helium enriched" air, but it is still a very small percentage helium.
You wonder about krypton and xenon, these are gases with only speciality applications and are probably minor byproducts from an air liquefaction plant. The market for helium is much much larger.
To ramp up production you'd have to build a new plant, and pay for it only through the sale of minor noble gases, the cross-subsidy from nitrogen and oxygen suddenly disappeared. Markets involving joint products are funny things.
OT, but kind of interesting - Xe, one of the 'inert' gases you've listed, is a remarkably effective and safe general anesthetic as well as a cardio- and neuroprotective agent for some kinds of ischemic events [1].
Still a little weird to those of us who studied chemistry when the 'noble gases' were famously reluctant to mingle.
Earth's atmosphere does not exhibit notable stratification by molecular weight until about 100 km up. The lower well-mixed portion is called the homosphere, and it is where these standard atmospheric composition values are measured. This near-uniform composition is also why, for instance, chlorofluorocarbons emitted at the surface reach the ozone layer and decompose it catalytically, even though their molecular weight is much greater than that of air.
It's not rising to the top of the atmosphere per se, but rather that atomic helium is so light that at atmospheric temperature a significant percentage of individual atoms are moving at Earth's escape velocity. Usually they bounce into something else, but there's always some lucky few that make their way through the upper atmosphere... and keep going.
That's why, for example, Saturn's atmosphere is 25% helium and 75% hydrogen, but Saturn's moon Titan is basically all nitrogen-methane.
Which is also the real answer about helium. Hydrogen we have in near-infinite supply by breaking chemical bonds (e.g. in water). Helium doesn't react with anything, so so the small amount trapped in oil and natural gas deposits from Earth's radioactivity over billions of years is all we have. After that... we'd better start investing in outer solar system mining operations, skimming the atmospheres of gas giants.
I, for one, look forward to a future working the gas mines.
Helium is constantly produced by radioactive decay in the Earth’s crust. I’d assume that this is the helium that’s found in the atmosphere; the rest probably escapes.
As a scuba diver I often use >2000 liters of helium on a single open circuit deep dive. I feel kind of bad about wasting a (mostly) non-renewable resource but with rebreathers still being expensive and dangerous there isn't any good alternative.
Yes there's a lot more that can go wrong with rebreathers. Open circuit is much more forgiving. As long as you can breathe you can stay alive. No single mistake will kill you and there are multiple opportunities to fix any problem. Whereas with a closed circuit rebreather there are failure modes which are essentially "silent" (or at least easy to overlook in a stressful situation) that can kill you quickly. Most rebreather deaths involve some sort of diver error, but I don't trust myself to be perfect every time.
I’d recommend giving them a shot - I honestly feel way better after rebreather deco than OC. Portable gas blending is awesome.
If you’re using a rebreather properly and have sufficient bailout, they’re pretty reliable these days. You can switch to OC for sanity breaths if you see an issue and use the draeger ball-gag mouthpiece if you’re concerned about O2 hits.
Sometimes this discussion arises, and as I remember it, there are two kind of "Helium" that should be discussed.
The first case is the common helium, used to fill up baloons and so on. It is mixed with many others gases, it is common, the price is very low, and despite being used to many things, it isn't running out, supplies aren't getting empty.
The second case is the "helium" as a pure gas, composed by helium and nothing else (except for traces of other gases). This is rare, this is expansive, this is hard to get (and it costs a lot to extract pure helium from the atmosphere). This is the helium that we are "running out", despite being able to extract it from sources, as the price might and will increase.
No there's really only one kind of helium, with varying levels of purity. Even balloon helium is usually almost 100% pure. Helium is never extracted from the air; there isn't enough of it there to be practical. We get it as a byproduct of natural gas extraction.
Are you sure? I ask, because latex helium filled balloons slowly lose air as the helium leaks out - but after some time they stop, and stay a fixed size.
But they don't float when they reach that point!
If it were pure helium, wouldn't a: all the helium leak out, and b: still float if for whatever reason the helium did not leak?
Personally I suspect helium balloons have just enough helium to float when full and the rest is regular air.
Latex balloons deflate due to helium permeating the latex. IIRC this is proportional to the difference in pressure between the inside and outside of the balloon. (Because the rate is proportional to the difference in pressure.)
The balloon isn't going to deflate completely; eventually the pressure on the inside and outside will equilibrate. The balloon doesn't return to its original pre-inflated size because, I suspect, of some amount of irreversible deformation of the rubber as it stretches when inflated.
But anyway, balloon helium is quite pure, it's typically "Class 4" or "four nines" so 99.99% pure. At the local gas supply place, balloon grade and the stuff used for welding shielding gas are the same thing. While a lower purity might be fine for balloons, it presumably isn't worth it to them to either dilute it with cheaper gas or maintain separate product lines.
Welder here. I don't buy helium for welding any more because it's too expensive; most welders use argon nowadays. But in any case the whole point of using inert gases in welding is to keep oxygen away from the hot metal. If welding-grade helium tanks contained any significant amount of oxygen they would defeat the whole purpose. And yes, for filling balloons, you just buy a tank of welding helium and screw a special balloon regulator onto the outlet port. The gas is identical. Makes you talk in a squeaky-high voice if you breathe a little of it; kills you dead if you breathe a lot of it.
(Edit: I know somebody is going to ask why it kills you. Helium is not toxic, but it suffocates you if you breathe a lot of it without a break for -- you know -- real air.)
Cheap "balloon gas" is 50% helium, 20% oxygen and 30% nitrogen. That's cheaper overall, and also safer when people decide to breathe it in to make silly voices.
As androidgirl said already, you need a certain amount of helium for floatation. Intuitively, you wouldn't expect a balloon with just a few molecule of helium to magically float.
But next time you come across such a deflated helium balloon, maybe try inhaling its gasses? If your voice changes, you know there's at least enough helium for that.
I don't know how safe that actually is, but it seems to me to be a common thing without much reporting of ill effects. Still, do your own research before.
I don't know how safe that actually is, but it seems to me to be a common thing without much reporting of ill effects
I've been doing that regularly for decades w/o apparent ill effect. I've even taken it straight out of the tank. Over-do it, and you can get woozy from oxygen displacement. But I can't imagine how the poster-child for inert gases is otherwise going to hurt you.
Careful. If you're breathing pure helium, the time between feeling woozy and passing out is much shorter than you think. I helped a friend set up and tear down an art project involving a 12-foot weather balloon filled with helium. At some point, I felt it was pretty wasteful to be just venting the helium without even playing with it. I sat down on the rubber gym floor for safety and had a friend watching. Two breaths of pure helium in a row was enough to make me pass out. I felt woozy and said "whoah", and I heard my head thump the rubber floor of the gymnasium. I was out just long enough for my friend to realize I wasn't joking around.
Had I been using a heavier gas (lower effusion rate and tendency to pool in the lungs) or not exhaled and inhaled when I started to feel woozy, I very easily could have required resuscitation.
That has been tried occasionally but it isn't common. Suffocation isn't a real risk since once you pass out you'll drop the balloon and breathe air again, although if you're standing up you might fall and hurt yourself.
Most retail gas suppliers prefer to sell only pure gasses. If they have to do custom mixing it requires extra processing steps for blending and analysis, plus they're taking on additional liability. So you can probably get heliox if you ask, but you'll pay more for it.
Gas suppliers keep all their helium in one big set of storage tanks. The only real difference between various helium grades they sell is how careful they are about pulling a vacuum on your cylinder before filling it.
Nope. The stuff you can get from party stores (in the US, anyway) definitely isn't; more than one person that I have heard of has committed suicide with it.
>> Isn’t balloon helium mixed with oxygen so that children don’t suffocate inhaling it?
> Nope. The stuff you can get from party stores (in the US, anyway) definitely isn't; more than one person that I have heard of has committed suicide with it.
Apparently, ballon helium is now often mixed with air in the US:
Ballon Time FAQ
https://www.balloontime.com/contact-us/faqs/Our helium is rated from 98-99.99 percent pure. However, due to global helium supply issues, we are now mixing helium with air. All tanks will have 80 percent or more helium.
This is almost entirely incorrect. Helium is generally not extracted from the atmosphere, it comes as a byproduct of mining natural gas (the same conditions that trap natural gas underground also traps noble gases produced by radioactive decay, Helium (being just a neutralized alpha particle) is a very common product of such decay and so abundant in natural gas deposits, but it requires special equipment to trap it). Historically the US has excelled at Helium production due to its natural gas infrastructure, and it has created a national strategic Helium reserve to maintain stocks of the gas just in case. However, the government has decided to sell of much of that reserve in recent years, lowering the price of Helium to artificial levels and destroying the natural economic incentives that would exist to produce and conserve Helium.
There's also the isotope Helium-3, which is far more scarce than Helium-4 and is rapidly running out. It's used to detect radiation and to reach ultralow temperatures in low-temperature physics research and medical cryogenics. It's scarcity has been a national security concern.
Good summary. For those who want to learn more, here's a more in-depth reply to the "Are running out of Helium?" questions. I'll just quote the definition that he uses, which in itself sheds light to teh matter:
"a mineral reserve is that amount of some mineral that we have identified the location of, weighed, measured, tested the extraction of and proven (and the proof is the extremely important part here) that we can, with current technology, and at current prices, make a profit by extracting it."
Perhaps a loose analogy would be with TAM/SAM/SOM.
If helium is “running out” then shouldn’t we have some sort of embargo on wasted helium uses like balloons? Or are consumer product uses of helium not a significant dent in the supply?
In the mid 90's idiots decided to eliminate the US strategic helium reserve, flooding the market, which explains things like helium balloons. Eventually, the stockpile will be entirely drawn down, and, costs will go up. That is what "running out" means in this case.
The reserve itself was filled from a series of government subsidized natural gas plants, so, it's possible to create a new giant bubble under some unused chunk of the southwest if it was required.
The reason why helium is "running out" is it is being treated as a cheap commodity which it is and was. Many experiments and machines would rather top off boiling away helium rather than recapture and recompress it in an expensive closed loop refrigeration unit. So yes dirt cheap helium being wasted will run out one day, but as the prices increase conservation will increase, and natural gas producers will find it more economical to invest in capturing it rather than letting it escape.
Can we not let the market sort it out? If we don't interfere in the free trade of helium and plausibly commit to never do so, the current price will always be the best estimate of the future price that we have, discounted by the expected interest rate. And thus if we are going to be running out and that is going to cause a shortage, the price will go up now and incentivize conservation.
Markets cannot incentivize conservation. They are designed to maximally use all available resources. In most cases it's a good thing, but in few cases it is catastrophic. (Think about it - the more is the resource being conserved, the more relatively abundant it becomes, and the cheaper it becomes in the market. The conservation of resource can only be done if it's use and extraction is punished, and free market only gives positive incentives.)
(That's why the markets cannot solve global warming for example, and that's why free market fundamentalists are often unable to believe that global warming is happening.)
This is not true. If you and I believe that the scarcity of a resource will rise tomorrow, we will try to buy it today so that we can sell it for a higher price after it becomes harder to get. All resource speculation (and boy, there is a lot,) is market-incentivised conservation.
Some of our medical machines were invented under the assumption that Helium would be dirt cheap.
Once the price of helium rises those machines will become absurdly expensive to operate, and people will start dying of treatable diseases.
Not your stated problem, but still a thing to keep in mind.
As the price rises, helium recapture and liquefaction will become more common. As recapture and liquefaction becomes more common, the price of the necessary equipment will tend to drop.
There is an experiment in our lab (ADMX, an axion search) for which it is already financially more expedient to re-liquify.
In addition, new cooling technology is becoming more prevalent. Closed-cycle pulse-tube cryocoolers are becoming common throughout physics.
You are both sort of right. Markets can contains incentives for conservation, but empirically have done a rather poor job of it. Part of the reason is undoubtedly the fact that the investors as a collection of economically-rational-actors models is incorrect, but there may be more to it as well.
Except you're requiring someone to choose to not make money today in order to maybe make more money tomorrow. If the seller thinks scarcity will rise tomorrow, they'll just raise prices today. Capitalist markets are traditionally both selfish and short-sighted. Market limits are how black markets are created. Eventually the market demands will raise prices high enough to incentivize illegal activity. See: elephants, rhinos, whales, etc.
Taxes are usually used in markets to act as "punishments". A carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system would effectively use markets to stop global warming.
Yes, the taxes are used in that way but they must be instituted by the government.
However, even a tax doesn't necessarily helps with the conservation of non-renewable resource. Since the tax is typically a percentage of the price, price going to 0 will still incentivize use of the resource despite tax being arbitrarily high. The same goes for cap-and-trade - which is how they actually failed - the emission quotas got very cheap and so everybody bought what they needed for business as usual.
The only way the carbon tax can work in case of carbon is that it becomes high enough that it's no longer efficient to produce energy from carbon sources compared to energy from renewable sources.
So the tax isn't really a punishment that would encourage conservation, it can just encourage substitute of different resource. If there isn't different resource.. you still won't conserve it even if you tax it a lot.
> Since the tax is typically a percentage of the price
For a duty tax, sure, but not not an excise tax. Those are often fixed rates. An NFA stamp for the transfer of banned weapons is a fixed rate ($200). Cigarette taxes [0] are also fixed values. Gasoline taxes have a similar fixed value [1].
There's always a different resource that you can substitute if you look widely enough at the big picture.
E.g. for party balloons, sure, maybe only helium works, but it's only there as an entertainment option, of which there are many substitutes.
Same for say, helium for scuba diving—sure, there might not be an alternative, but the purpose of most forms of scuba diving may be fulfilled by alternatives (submersibles / robots / snorkeling depending on whether for practical or enjoyment purposes).
A tax would drive people to fulfilling the wider economic and societal need without using a product that requires helium.
> which is how they actually failed
Cap and trade did not 'fail', it succeeded in capping emissions at the number of credits + allowances. If you want to reduce emissions more, then reduce the total quantity.
Price targeting and quantity targeting are just different ways of stating what your goal is.
Markets can predict future shortages and rise prices in anticipation. Nobody wants to sell cheaply today if they can get more than the prevailing interest rate by sitting on the resource. And if we are talking about really long time frames where the risk/reward ratio is not clear, why should we assume the governmental decision is better than someone who has financial skin in the game? Maybe the conservation decision will actually be a bad outcome, conserving at a great present cost something that will be worthless in the future.
Global warming and other environmental problems have nothing to do with this. The environment is a shared resource so market participants have no incentive to preserve it, on the contrary, they rush to "use" as much of the common resource as possible and maximize present gain, before someone else kills the planet and there are no more money to be made. The solution there is to tax the externalities and transform the public resource into a private cost that must be minimized, thus preserving the resource. Helium is not such a public resource, it's private to those who have it, produce it and store it.
Helium isn't really a resource that speculators can sit on. We get it as a byproduct of natural gas production and no one is going to stop extracting natural gas just to save helium for the future. And once you have helium it's expensive to store.
Then... how do you propose to conserve it? If you can't speculate it, then by definition you can't ration it.
(By the way, if you read the article, it nicely explains how the US Helium reserve works and how it has been dismantled in recent years; so you can in fact store huge amounts of helium, should it ever make economic sense to do so).
I am aware of how the US helium reserve works. Something like that can only practically be done by a government which doesn't care much about costs. And it has a significant leakage rate, so helium is more like a perishable commodity than something that can be stored indefinitely. Ultimately we can't really conserve helium, but we can avoid wasting it on frivolous things.
Again, if we can't conserve it, it's impossible to waste it. It's a logical contradiction. It's like wind power, you either tap it and use it or not, either way it's gone.
The fact that it's difficult (impossible) to store helium long term is an argument against government intervention because it disrupts present consumption for no clear reason and with meager future benefits.
This is absolutely false. Even a basic understanding of supply and demand shows that a decrease in supply causes the equilibrium price to increase and the equilibrium quantity to decrease.
Except in case of conservation, supply is not decreasing (more precisely, since the word supply is overloaded, supply curve doesn't change). That's the flaw in the argument.
And you can't model the situation (of conserving a resource) in supply-demand model.. precisely because markets cannot do it.
The literal definition of Economics is the distribution of scarce resources.
The entire point of supply and demand models is for the exact purpose of deciding whether we should use resources now, or use them later (ie conservation), and decide how and who we should spend those resources on.
If you were to ask be to give a definition of economics or supply and demand, a situation exactly like this is what I would use to define those words.
We let the market sort out whale oil. Whale oil was cheap for a long time, followed by modest price increases, followed by complete collapse of the world's whaling fleets, after which point you could not get it for any amount of money.
The current price is not the best estimate of the future rate. It is distorted by people selling below it's true cost (typically, to pay off sunk costs, or to keep the lights on in their business.)
Couple random counterarguments (no idea how valid):
* It's hard to exclude people from whaling, so you can't "stockpile" whales.
* Markets had less global visibility and insight than we have now, so it's clearer what the speculation opportunity would be.
* Important financial instruments used in speculation (standardized forward and option contracts) had only recently been invented, and wouldn't be generalized out from farm commodities until after the collapse of whaling.
The same thing happened with the West Atlantic cod fishery collapse in the 1990s. We had a mechanism for excluding people from fishing (Catch quotas), markets had global visibility and insight, and speculative financial instruments, which by that point were quite well developed.
We went from having record-breaking harvests of cod to no cod, at all. There was a collective agreement, to prevent over-harvesting of cod - and all the participants in the agreement lobbied the Canadian government to lift its restrictions (Which it did, contrary to the advice of the scientists studying cod.) A few years down the road, the fish was gone, and the fishermen went broke.
That’s the tragedy of the commons at play. It’s caused by incentives that arise from a shared-resource system.
The solution is to (1) internalize the externalities and (2) allow individuals to take over the property rights of a resource, i.e. privatize it. This shifts the game-theoretic equilibrium away from resource depletion.
> allow individuals to take over the property rights of a resource, i.e. privatize it
At what price?
If the state owns land with a billion barrels of tar sands oil on it, should they sell it for $1/barrel? $2/barrel? Should it accept the highest bid that the market will put forward?
What if the state sat on the land for 10 years - would it get a better bid then? Maybe it makes sense to wait until the time is right to privatize?
Deciding when, and for how much, to put resource-bearing land onto the market is a highly political, non-market-driven process. You can't just say 'privatize it', and hope that markets will find the optimal outcome. (Optimal for whom?)
Setting the right level of royalties, or, alternatively, privatization for any particular point in time is an incredibly complicated economic question.
That is a great question. There are various types of auction systems that can be used. See [1] for an overview.
> If the state owns land with a billion barrels of tar sands oil on it, should they sell it for $1/barrel? $2/barrel? Should it accept the lowest bid that the market will put forward?
Why would they accept the lowest bid? Typically in an auction one accepts the highest bid (except a Vickrey auction, where the price paid is the second-highest bid). This is particularly true in the context of privatization because resources should be allocated to those who value them most and thus have the strongest incentive to use them efficiently [1].
> What if the state sat on the land for 10 years - would it get a better bid then? Maybe it makes sense to wait until the time is right to privatize?
It depends on the government's goals. The underlying assumption of privatization is that markets are better resource managers than central planners (e.g. due to the price mechanism solving the economic calculation problem). If a government wants to maximize efficient allocation of ownership rights, then it should privatize as quickly as possible using one of the aforementioned approaches. If a government just wants to maximize revenue for themselves (see Venezuela), well, then anything goes.
> Deciding when, and for how much, to put resource-bearing land onto the market is a highly political, non-market-driven process.
The issue is indeed highly political. However, it is by definition also market-driven. Unless by "non-market-driven" you meant not exclusively market driven, in which case I would agree.
> You can't just say 'privatize it', and hope that markets will find the optimal outcome. (Optimal for whom?)
Optimal for society at large, through efficient allocation of ownership rights. We do not have to rely on "hope" since there is a lot of empirical and theoretical evidence that markets are better resource-managers than governments.
What if the highest bid that you receive today is not as high as what you would receive in 10 years? The government owning land, is by proxy, the public owning land. As a member of the public, and as such, a minority shareholder in that land, I want to either see the proceeds from its use be distributed to me, or, if it will be sold, to be sold at a good price [1]. If a buyer willing to pay such a price is not found today, then I'd rather sit on that land for a decade, then see it go for pennies on the dollar. As a shareholder, I don't give two rats asses about giving up my stake so that someone else could optimize overall economic productivity today. I want to optimize the overall gains for myself, overall.
> Optimal for society at large, through efficient allocation of ownership rights. I don't understand your use of the term "hope", since there is a lot of empirical and theoretical evidence that markets are better resource-managers than governments.
At its extreme, the most efficient allocation of ownership rights would lead to the government selling off all the oxygen in the country, and you having to pay some rentier, just so that you could breathe. Optimizing for situations like this is a fringe, highly ideological position.
[1] Markets aren't always liquid, there are, at any point in time, few buyers for billions of dollars worth of land, the few bids may not be competitive, you may not get your money's worth if you start a resource firesale tomorrow.
> What if the highest bid that you receive today is not as high as what you would receive in 10 years?
What if it is lower?
And if the government has some special knowledge as to what oil prices will be in the future, it should instead buy a bunch of oil and openly trade on the market.
I simply do not believe that the government has this special knowledge or is significantly better than the market.
If you want to reduce risk, you could instead sell the land over time. IE, sell x% of the land every year, over the next 10 years.
The risk that prices will go down is just as a big of a problem as the risk that prices will go up. I see no reason why one should choose status quo bias in favor of keeping unused land that might go up or might go down.
You raise an interesting point in your first paragraph. However, no man is an island and this is especially true for players in a market economy. Improvements in efficiency at the societal level benefit you at the individual level, and conversely, the opportunity cost of foregoing such improvements harms you as well.
Theoretically, one could wait 10 years to maybe get a higher payout (if such a thing weren’t already reflected in the current market price). However, I can’t think of a real-world example where doing so would offset the opportunity cost of lost efficiency during the intervening years.
> At its extreme, the most efficient allocation of ownership rights would lead to the government selling off all the oxygen in the country, and you having to pay some rentier, just so that you could breathe. Optimizing for situations like this is a fringe, highly ideological position.
You find this bizarre because oxygen (at atmospheric concentrations) is not (currently) a scarce resource on Earth, so it makes no sense to assign property rights over it. In situations where oxygen becomes a scarce resource, like space stations or planetary colonies, you can bet there will be a market for oxygen. That is, unless technology makes it feasible to produce in such abundance that the price goes to zero.
There’s already a market for pure oxygen needed for industrial uses, so there’s nothing verboten about oxygen being priced. In that sense, it’s just a resource like any other.
We did that when Bill Clinton ordered that the National Helium Reserve be sold off. The "Helium Privatization Act", as it was called, was disastrous. The price dropped precipitiously, and in turn every third-tier college bought their high-field NMR. A boon for Bruker and Varian, less so for science.
According to [1], the problem with the Helium Privatization Act was that it ordered that helium be sold at a formula-driven price that was much lower than the market price for helium. So the problem wasn’t the market. It was the government mismanaging privatization.
I was unable to find the actual breakdown of helium consumption by application, but I assume party balloons are pretty high on the list. Most of the other commercial uses (such as in medicine, welding, diving, etc.) tend to use smaller amounts of helium and do not lose the helium after one usage. This seems like a great example of something where market prices will sort make helium balloons obsolete before helium starts to become too cost prohibitive for its more 'important' uses.
It is lumped into the "other" category on this chart.
One of the problems is that our helium supply comes as a byproduct of the oil and gas industry so as we switch to renewable energy sources the yearly supply will diminish even as demand increases.
So party balloons may become unaffordable but that won't affect the total demand very much. Or maybe we'll have far more exciting party balloons filled with hydrogen gas instead.
"One of the problems is that our helium supply comes as a byproduct of the oil and gas industry so as we switch to renewable energy sources the yearly supply will diminish even as demand increases."
Unlikely. It is not a byproduct of the oil industry. It is very specifically a byproduct of the gas industry. NG is the least carbon intensive fossil fuel so it's likely to lag. Further, you can separate and reinject.
One question that chart brings to mind though is what is the loss/recapture/reuse rate for those various uses? Many clearly involve atmospheric venting so they're just a loss, but I'd imagine cryogenics at least must often have at least the potential for reuse of parts of it.
Party balloons are a 100% loss though, so even if they're only a lesser fraction of that 13% "Other" category (7%? 4%?) every bit that goes there ends up vented so I could see that adding up over time vs others.
Ideally proper pricing would help take care of this but that's pretty hard for something like helium.
Another interesting market is the isotope helium 3 [1], which has various medical applications, and which only industrial source is the natural decay of radioactive material in nuclear weapons, which need to be "purged" regularly to collect the helium.
An interesting thing I learned a few years ago, don't remember where exactly, is that when people say things like, "We only have x years of material y left", what they are actually saying is that the known sources of that material will last for the next `y` years.
There is almost always another way to get the raw materials, it just doesn't currently make sense to look for them because there are existing sources that are already available and meeting demand.
We know how to make Helium using fusion, so we'll never "run out". However we'll definitely run out of Helium that is cheap enough to fill your hard disk with.
Unlikely. Even if it was easy and convenient to mine and transport as moonrocks (it isn’t) the helium would have to be more expensive than gold to be worth the cost.
Naturally Helium is produced due to radio active decay of radio active elements but all nuclear reactors also produce Helium as a by product which can be captured (worse case most expensive scenario). I am also bit confused by the fact that Helium is so cheap and easy to buy, why haven't the price sky rocketed yet. You easily order a decent size tank of Helium for $50 online.
Haven't been able to verify your claim "all nuclear reactors also produce Helium as a by product". While Helium manufacture is a given for about all forms of fusion (if fusion ever takes off we'll barely be able to supply our party balloon demand since there's so little material needed for fusion).
Fission (as one would find in a nuclear power reactor) does not appear to generate helium. Cesium-137 and Strontium-90 appear to be the major products, the former eventually turning into Barium-137 (no alpha decay), and the latter eventually to Zirconium-90 (no alpha decay).
Poking around on Wikipedia, it appears that fission and its byproducts indeed do not generate alpha particles, but the enriched uranium and plutonium also undergo alpha decay, so simply collecting lots of fissile material in one place should produce a noticeable amount of helium.
one of the links in the article leads to congress's passing of the helium privatization act of 1996. could the fragility if the helium markets be a self inflicted wound?
This story seems to resurface every few months, and the answer to the question of whether or not we’re running out of the second most common element in the known universe is still “No.” It is true that most helium is the byproduct of natural gas production, and demand for Helium is rising while (hopefully) demand for fossil fuels will dwindle. It is also true that Helium may become more expensive if we keep wasting it on party balloons. That is not the same as “running out” however, and we’re not running out of it.
Maybe someday the media can honestly reflect reality in this case with a headline that talks about being less wasteful of a valuable resource so that it doesn’t become painfully expensive, rather than framing in terms of actual scarcity on Earth. It’s also one of those areas where the market can probably handle this because few people will be willing to pay big bucks for a single party balloon. Given that balloons are harmful to the environment to begin with, letting that tradition naturally die off seems like a win-win.
Edit: As another poster has pointed out, natural gas subsidies are a problem, which artificially depress the price of Helium. That is still not “running out” though.
"second most common element in the known universe "
How about here on Earth? Since it doesn't chemically bond to other elements, the gas form escapes the atmosphere and is blown away by solar wind, effectively lost forever. All that we have is the byproduct of nuclear fission that is prevented from reaching the atmosphere by stratigraphic trap. It has that reservoir characteristic in common with natural gas, but as we know Carbon is much more reactive and goes through the carbon cycle. We could run out of Helium in any practical sense.
Helium might be the second most abundant element in the universe, but that doesn't say much about the abundance here on Earth and how much of that can be feasibly extracted.
You seem to be getting very upset over the phrase "running out" vs "painfully expensive" when the former can easily, and often is, interpreted as the latter, and articles which talk about a resource "running out" usually describe what they mean by that, therein.
I too tend toward pedantry but I try to stop myself and say "I can be technically correct all the time or I can be sane"
running out of the second most common element in the known universe is still "No."
That's a disingenuous way of framing it. The universe clearly isn't in any danger of running out of helium, but nobody is talking about that because it isn't relevant to what it costs us to collect it on earth.
Isaac Asimov wrote about carelessness with helium in his 1977 essay "The Vanishing Element," published in American Airlines on-board magazine "The American Way." I can't find a copy of it online but I did read it at the time.
>Helium may become more expensive if we keep wasting it on party balloons.
Not to nitpick, but only a tiny fraction of all helium use is "wasted on party balloons". Most is used for cryo-cooling applications. Heck, we use more helium by far scuba-diving than on party balloons.
All helium that goes into a balloon is wasted, never to be recovered. In scientific applications it is typically recycled. I don’t know about SCUBA, but I’d venture to say that it’s a necessity for deep dives whereas in a balloon it’s a novelty.
Helium 5.24
Neon 18.18
Krypton 1.14
Argon 9340
Xenon 0.087
http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/Fundamentals/AtmosphereComp...
Krypton is rarer in the atmosphere than helium (by molar/volume concentration), though more abundant by mass. Krypton is commercially produced by atmospheric separation. I would therefore expect helium sourced by air separation to cost roughly 1/4-1/5 the cost of krypton production, per liter, or 4-5 times as much per gram. A quick search on Google shows krypton at 65 cents per liter in the early 2000s (according to an article about windowpane gas filling). An Alibaba search indicates that 10-15 cents per liter may be more typical now.
If those krypton prices are accurate, and I haven't made any major mistakes with my helium ballparking, I would expect that applications like helium filled hard drives would see only a tiny cost increase should they be forced to use helium separated from the atmosphere. I think that most cryogenic cooling applications would have to move to closed-cycle reuse of helium. I don't know about welding and leak testing.
EDIT: "The Energy-Related Applications of Helium", 1980 report from Los Alamos National Laboratory, specifically considers helium production from atmospheric separation and from lean natural gas streams in section X.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5141581
A.W. Francis has discussed the recovery of helium from the atmosphere by conventional methods. He predicts that, for helium produced from the atmosphere as a by-product from air separation plants, the cost would lie in the range of $200 to $300 per Mcf in 1973 dollars (over ten times present cost).
...
To go further and separate helium by similar techniques but with helium as the primary product would raise the cost by more than another order of magnitude to about $7000 Mcf in 1980 dollars.
Apparently one Mcf is 28,317 liters in SI units. That's 24.7 cents per liter of helium from the atmosphere in 1980 dollars, or 80 cents per liter in CPI-adjusted 2018 dollars.