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The Increasing Scarcity of Helium - Priceonomics
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The Increasing Scarcity of Helium
Priceonomics
In a few generations, balloons might become a thing of the past (Matthew Faitz)
Buy a balloon at the zoo. Let it go and watch it shrink down to a tiny dot and then disappear into the stratosphere. Either that balloon will fly too high and shatter, or it will slowly leak out its lighter-than-air contents. Either way, eventually the helium inside the balloon will escape and make its way out of the atmosphere. The earth is literally leaking its helium into outer space.
That’s the future of most of the world’s helium over the next 100 years, scientists say. Such is the fate of a gas lighter than air — Earth’s gravitational pull just can’t hold it.
The earth’s crust emits some helium, but the atmosphere loses it fast. The helium in our atmosphere is pretty stable at 5.2 parts per million. Extracting that small amount from the air would be very expensive. The helium that you can buy and use is extracted from natural gas reserves, mostly in the United States. After it’s extracted, and used — be it for party balloons, or MRI machines, or rockets, or to grow crystals for silicon wafers — most of it makes its way up, up, and away.
As helium supplies start to dwindle, the prices have already started to rise, and party balloons are taking a back-seat to the more serious applications. A hundred years down the line, a party balloon might be about as precious as a gold ring.
Despite the fact that science has known about the impending helium scarcity for decades, it’s only made the news in the past five years. Why that is has a lot to do with helium’s complicated political history in the United States.
How Did We Get Here?
Helios’ son joy riding on his father’s chariot (Nicolas Bertin)
In 1868, the existence of helium was first detected as a line in the spectral signature of sunlight in a solar eclipse. It was named “helium” after the Greek god Helios, who drew the sun across the sky every day behind his golden chariot. It was first isolated by Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay in 1895. In the same year, Swedish chemists Per Teodor Cleve and Abraham Langet discovered the gas independently, and collected enough of it to determine its atomic number: 2.
Helium is present in the sun’s energy spectrum because it’s a giant ball of hydrogen gas and helium gas. It has such gravitational pull that, at the center, hydrogen atoms (which have one proton) are fused together and become helium atoms (which have two protons). This process is known as nuclear fusion, and it gives off energy — a lot of it. Enough that we can see the sun’s light, and feel its heat, from almost 100 million miles away. We don’t get any of its helium, though. And the helium first isolated by scientists was the byproduct of dissolving the mineral uraninite in acid, a process that was both radioactive and expensive.
Then in 1903, an oil rig in Kansas produced a geyser of initially disappointingly non-flammable gas. The gas was taken back to a lab for analysis and determined to be 1.8% helium — a much higher concentration than was found in the atmosphere. Engineers started examining gas from wells across the country, and as a result scientists wrote in 1906, “helium is no longer a rare element, but a common element, existing in goodly quantity for uses that are yet to be found for it."
Why helium is much better than hydrogen for airships
Now that it was common, helium was a natural choice to fill rubber balloons and zeppelins, which had previously been filled with the similarly buoyant but highly combustible hydrogen. But it was not at all common outside the United States, and the government sought to keep it that way. In 1925, Congress established the United States National Helium Reserve, as a strategic stockpile of helium for military and commercial airships. The 1927 Helium Control Act prohibited helium’s export. As a result, foreign blimps and zeppelins like the Hindenburg were filled with hydrogen, resulting in the infamous disaster.
Other important uses for helium were soon discovered. In addition to being lighter than air, helium has an extremely low boiling point: 4.22 Kelvin, or -452.07 degrees Fahrenheit, the lowest of all the elements. That ends up being very useful, because if you can keep it in a liquid state, you have an excellent coolant. When a liquid boils, it stays at its boiling point so long as it stays liquid — it never gets any hotter. Water never exceeds 212 degrees, and liquid helium never exceeds -452 degrees. Helium started being used to insulate arc welding, and, later, superconductors and nuclear reactors, and in cryogenics. The use of helium as a coolant is the leading use of helium today.
Other uses of helium: The gas is...