
Will We Run Out of Helium? - jelliclesfarm
https://www.thoughtco.com/will-we-run-out-of-helium-3975959
======
colechristensen
This keeps coming up.

We won't run out of helium, it will just become much more expensive, like
neon. You can distill helium out of the atmosphere, but it's a few orders of
magnitude more expensive than separating from natural gas, which will remain a
source for a very long time.

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, wherever it is to
be found, we'll find it.

It just won't be very affordable for birthday parties.

~~~
peterburkimsher
"keeps coming up", pun intended?

I agree that it's unaffordable for birthday parties, but the side effect of
littering rubber waste for birds to choke on is arguably a more serious reason
to forego party balloons.

What I'm more worried about is a replacement for liquid helium in cooling.
CERN depends on cryogenics for keeping superconducting magnets cold. Helium's
a lot safer than hydrogen. What other alternatives will there be for
supercooling when there's no helium?

~~~
gridlockd
> What I'm more worried about is a replacement for liquid helium in cooling.
> CERN depends on cryogenics for keeping superconducting magnets cold.
> Helium's a lot safer than hydrogen. What other alternatives will there be
> for supercooling when there's no helium?

Is that really a big concern? What's expected to come out of CERN that will
help humanity face the challenges of the next 1000 years? It's an honest
question, perhaps I'm missing something.

~~~
wyattpeak
Nothing specific is expected (that's the point of basic research), but even
ignoring the question of whether "facing challenges" is the only worthwhile
goal of humanity, it's categorically erroneous to think that basic physics
can't become extremely important to our lives.

Nobody in the world thought there was any practical use of the knowledge that
time dilated at high speed - the speeds were so ridiculously high that we'd
never reach them.

That part was right - nothing we build moves fast enough for time dilation to
be relevant at a human level. But none of our navigational systems, to pick a
single case, would work without an understanding of it.

~~~
gridlockd
Like, I said, it was an honest question. The answer, according to, you is:
Nothing. Fair enough.

I'm aware that there's an off-chance that basic research can become useful for
something. Of course people always point to GPS as an example.

You can say that about pretty much _any_ research, however. Since resources
are finite, should we not focus on basic research that has the most promise of
practical usefulness?

As far as I can tell, particle accelerators are used to prove hypotheses whose
truth/falsehood are not practically meaningful to pretty much any human being
alive, now or in the future. It's an expensive hobby for physicists, as far as
I can see.

Again, I'd love to hear a better argument than the old "basic research is good
because GPS".

~~~
wyattpeak
GPS is always used as an example because it's a clear demonstration that
discoveries don't have to have effects at the human scale to be useful, not
because it's the only example of basic research that's paid off.

All electricity, all chemistry, started out as expensive hobbies for rich
people. Go back to the Greeks and steam power and automation were seen as
expensive hobbies for rich people. None of these things were thought to be
practically meaningful to pretty much any human being alive.

There is only a small chance that any given piece of research is useful, to be
sure. Basic research is fundamentally about long-shots. But without basic
research, you never get to the stage of directed research. You can't work out
the best way to increase transistor density if you don't first work out what
electricity is. But in the nineteenth century, it would have been wiser to
have directed all that research into electricity into practical things like
hydraulics. Where would we be now if we'd taken that path?

If you think there's nothing else to be found in physics, sure, we can stop.
But plenty of people in the ancient world thought there was nothing left, too.
All of those detractors have been wrong right up until the last century. The
question is, how sure are you that you're the first generation in two thousand
years to be right?

~~~
gridlockd
> If you think there's nothing else to be found in physics, sure, we can stop.
> But plenty of people in the ancient world thought there was nothing left,
> too.

To the contrary, I think there's an infinite amount of things to be found out,
across _all_ sciences. However, for all I can tell, CERN is out to prove
hypotheses for which no one today can conceive of any use whatsoever.

By contrast, there are many relatively low-hanging fruits in science and
engineering that _aren 't_ long shots at all.

I'm not gonna say the billion-dollar budget of CERN should be re-appropriated,
but it does seem overblown.

In any event, I'm not at all worried about CERN shutting down because helium
gets to expensive.

------
alex_young
This is fear mongering.

Helium production is a byproduct of natural gas production. If we're not
running out of natural gas we're not running out of helium.

There are plenty of reasons to quit extracting natural gas, but that's a
separate matter.

~~~
scotradamus
This most certainly is not fear mongering. Helium is a non renewable resource.
We used to discuss this all the time in the laboratory I used to work at.

~~~
nickik
What a non renewable resource we have run out off?

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Just because you have yet to die doesn't mean you're immortal.

~~~
nickik
There have been smart asses talking about Peak Caol for 250 years. We are
going towards going on 70 years of Peak Oil. There were widespread scares in
the 70s about all kinds of metals running out because of 'Overpopulation'
(another nonsense concept that people repeatly dig out. In the 60s there was a
believe that fission materials was incredibly limited. In the 90s and 2000s
there was an actual beleive that there were not enough 'rare earth' materials.

And we had for a long time a clear economic explaition why this happens. Its
well understood but somehow the same ideas are repeated all the time.

And your example is horrifingly bad, because if we were talking about humans
there would be a mountain of evidence that in fact humans are not important.

However in the whole history of the modern world we have never actually run
out of a non-renewable resource. Even when supposedly the smartest people
predicted it over and over and over and over again.

At some point this is just idiological bable unsupported by even the slightest
amount of evidence and should be treated as such.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
So what's your argument here? That it's impossible to run out of resources? Or
that we don't need to worry because human's always have and always will
innovate their way out of every problem?

It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has
never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it"
\- do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways
out of things?

The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made
aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of
the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these
things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could
happen.

~~~
nickik
Human innovation is just one kind of response, to the general trend. The real
argument here is about the price, a finite resources that everybody understand
to be running out would already raise in price long before any actual real
limit is hit. The price system response to both on the supply and the demand
side and importantly it doesn't respond in real time rather its actually
predictive.

So if somebody says that something that is now available for essentially free,
ie used to fill up balloons and children birthday parties you immediately know
that it is nonsense.

With all of these arguments going back 200-300 years the people who make them
never take a general higher level trend into account to make their argument.

> It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something
> has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about
> it" \- do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our
> ways out of things?

What I'm saying is that we should be intellectually honest and look at the
actual trends and data we have historically for such claims and consult our
models that we as humanity have developed to understand how these dynamic
works.

This is what we do in basically every single situation but somehow when
arguing about 'resources running out' we throw this out and are just willing
to believe the same old nonsense arguments over and over again.

> The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were
> made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become
> aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware
> of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they
> could happen.

That is a totally different problem. The Ozone was a externalize problem.
Focusing on those kind of problems makes actual sense. That's my exact point,
instead of inventing nonsense scaremongering problems about Peak-Whatever.

------
danbr
Tom Scott made a great video about this:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8)

~~~
sixothree
This is a channel worth subscribing to.

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gridlockd
> "Why would such a valuable resource be squandered? Basically, it's because
> the price of helium does not reflect its value. Most of the world's supply
> of helium is held by the United States National Helium Reserve, which was
> mandated to sell off all of its stockpile by 2015, regardless of price"

This doesn't make sense to me. If the market price doesn't reflect its value,
why wouldn't somebody just buy up all the artificially cheap helium and
stockpile it, to sell it at its "true" market value later?

We're still putting Helium in party balloons, after all. Why aren't all the
"high value" users of Helium hedging for a time when Helium becomes more
scarce? Is this really a market failure, or is there something missing from
this narrative?

~~~
dmurray
It's expensive to store, and it may not be worth building the storage
facilities if you only get to use them once. So the market is not perfectly
efficient here.

But yes, this argument explains why the "running out of helium" narrative is
overblown.

~~~
gridlockd
The market has vehicles for this, e.g. purchasing rights to the helium while
leaving it underground. Perhaps that's not what the law allows for, however.

------
royjacobs
Tom Scott did an interesting video on the topic recently:
[https://youtu.be/mOy8Xjaa_o8](https://youtu.be/mOy8Xjaa_o8)

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reportgunner
> _Why would such a valuable resource be squandered? Basically, it 's because
> the price of helium does not reflect its value._

The whole paragraph doesn't make sense to me.

The article doesn't answer the question asked in the title. I am not really
sure about the message of the article, perhaps it was about the US helium
reserve being decommissioned but not actually ?

~~~
Jeff_Brown
> > the price of helium does not reflect its value

> doesn't make sense

Indeed. Unless there are externalities, a free market by definition brings a
price into line with the current value of a good.

~~~
learnstats2
It's an externality that future Earth won't have Helium.

~~~
Jeff_Brown
By that logic the consumption of any nonrenewable resource at all imposes the
same externality. We can't know what the future value of helium will be, but
our best guess is incorporated into the current price.

I should admit that the concept of externality is subtle, and I don't know
that I've ever seen a precise definition. A taxi driver should not consider
the existence of a competing driver an externality, for instance, but a
definition that avoids such implications is not obvious.

------
dbtx
IANAP but I imagine this for a worst case: we are forced to find a way to
painstakingly harvest it from vast arrays of solar-powered Hirsch-Farnsworth
fusors. Then later on the question will be, "Will we run out of deuterium?"

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Speaking of harvesting, I was randomly wondering what kind of minerals could
be mined from the moon the other day, apparently it’s packed with helium.

(figures it’s dun floating overhead all the time)

~~~
jansan
Are you thinking of a tube made of nanofibers dangling from the moon into the
atmosphere, through which helium will be pumped? Sounds intriguing. Jeff
Bezos, are you listening?

------
United857
I'm curious to see how much helium is being used for "recreational" purposes
(e.g. party balloons) vs. medical/industrial uses. Has anyone attempted to
quantify/estimate this breakdown? I haven't found anything online on this
topic.

~~~
darksaints
For the most part, if you need something a lot lighter than air, Hydrogen
works. If you need something inert, there are better and more commonly
available noble gases (including neon which is lighter than air, but only
slightly). I can't imagine any sort of application where you would need
something significantly lighter than air _and_ inert. I'm curious as to which
uses actually require helium and only helium.

~~~
dr_orpheus
One of the other reasons helium is used besides being inert and lightweight is
its use in cryocooling. That it is why it is used in MRI machines to cool the
superconducting magnets. The melting point of helium is 0.95 Kelvin (-458
Farenheit), and is used to cool the superconducting magnets to below 10 K [1].

The other most commonly used liquid for crycooling is liquid nitrogen. But
Nitrogen freezes at 63 K (-320 F) so you can not get it cold enough for all
applications.

Liquid helium is also used in the Aerospace industry for testing or running
spacecraft hardware that will be at those extremely cold temperatures. For
example the optics of the James Webb Space Telescope need to be that cold in
order to measure the weak infrared signals, else the thermal noise from the
instrument itself would overwhelm the signal [2]

[1]
[https://www.lindeus.com/en/industries/medical/_mri/liquid_he...](https://www.lindeus.com/en/industries/medical/_mri/liquid_helium.html)
[2]
[https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html#temps](https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/faqs/faq.html#temps)

------
fuzzfactor
I'm trying hard not to.

Now stockpiling an extra 50 tanks as a buffer for a half-tank-a-day habit.

Sadly I did not build the lab I'm at now or we could be getting more done with
less than 10 percent of what we use presently, and we're quite a bit better
than average already.

Lots of technical debt for helium users consists of old systems which were
built when helium was way less expensive and leaked a lot but was not
significant dollars compared to other commonly known corporate waste so nobody
cared.

It may be surprising to some, but there are many high-tech organizations you
would expect to be able to handle their helium as tightly as possible, but
that capability is truly not in house nor within reach even from contractors
who appear to have the capability because they have actual satisfied
customers.

Not everybody can do it the NASA way and that's what you need.

Otherwise continued helium reduction efforts do not reduce expenditures like
they do at first, once you get far enough below the overall leak rate.

As to whether the Earth or maybe just gas users will run out or have to give
up, Kornbluth probably knows as much as anybody:

[http://www.kornbluthheliumconsulting.com/](http://www.kornbluthheliumconsulting.com/)

------
fishnchips
So, if helium is light enough to escape Earth's gravity, why don't we use
helium balloons to go to space? I mean, these guys [0] are trying to take a
rocket to the edge of space using a helium balloon, but there's still a good
old-fashioned rocket involved.

[0] [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-49827415](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-
wales-49827415)

~~~
mcv
"Going to space" is a lot more than merely getting out of the atmosphere. You
need to get orbital velocity, and a balloon isn't going to do that.

For an individual helium atom it's possible to pick up enough velocity to
escape Earth's gravity. When they're all tied together in a balloon, that's
not going to happen.

------
Iv
I hope so! And I hope we find several more critical uses of it! Then we have
finally an economic incentive to do gas giants "mining" stations.

~~~
DagAgren
Lifting anything out of the gravity well of a gas giant is pretty much
impossible. We struggle to lift anything off Earth because our gravity well is
so deep, and those of gas giants are more than an order of magnitude worse.

~~~
joosters
Isn't the main problem causing the shortage of helium that it _doesn 't_
struggle to be lifted off the Earth, in fact it floats away quite effectively
on its own?

~~~
wyattpeak
Yes, but this won't help with gas giants - the reason they have a large amount
of helium is that their gravity is sufficient to keep it in.

------
miguelmota
Planet Money has a good podcast on how the US government started stockpiling
helium

[https://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751845378/episode-933-find-
th...](https://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751845378/episode-933-find-the-helium)

------
karimmaassen
Tom Scott explained it well
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8)

------
jessant
If it gets rare enough, it will incentivize space industry in order to mine it
from the moon.

~~~
Rebelgecko
Most of the helium on the moon is a different isotope than terrestrial helium,
are Helium-3 and Helium-4 interchangeable for the various industrial uses?

------
nickik
This comes up again and again. No we want. Humans don't run out of non-
renewable resources, the price just goes up. At worse we stop using if for
party ballons.

Humans actually are far better at using up renewable resources, like whales.

~~~
kilo_bravo_3
>Humans don't run out of non-renewable resources, the price just goes up.

How much for a live passenger pigeon?

------
coldtea
Running out of helium doesn't sound funny!

------
Lagogarda
Will we run out of Sun energy?

~~~
rimliu
Not before Sun scorches the Earth (and Mercury and Venus on the way).

------
onion2k
We can always 'make' more. We just need to invent fusion reactors.

~~~
colechristensen
No we can't. To match the yearly consumption of helium we would create so much
energy that the Earth wouldn't be habitable. Just the waste heat would be
about the same as the heat we get from the sun.

~~~
onion2k
If we have fusion reactors we will get more helium. That is indisputable.
Helium is a byproduct of hydrogen fusion.

We might not be able to make enough to continue our current level of helium
usage, but that's a completely different problem.

~~~
Jeff_Brown
It's the problem being discussed in the article and this thread.

