Several years ago I recall hearing about how there was (is) a worldwide shortage of helium gas. I’d always heard that helium is the second most common element in the universe. Apparently not on earth, though. My question(s) are: where is helium found on earth? How is it extracted? And why can’t they just extract or process more?
Helium is trapped, along with natural gas, in salt domes and other oil formations.
That’s basically, the only place to find it in significant quantities, and it’s replenishment rate (it is produced from atomic decay) is very slow. Once we tap those sources, it’s going to get very expensive. Helium party balloons are a criminal waste.
I’d also read somewhere that the US had a strategic reserve of helium that had been maintained for decades but several years ago “they” decided to sell it off on the cheap.
AIUI, lack of access to helium was why Germany was forced to use hydrogen in their Zeppelins, and hence the Hindenburg disaster. It’s obviously not that they didn’t know hydrogen was flammable.
Starting in the very early 20th century helium extracted in gas processing was put in storage as a national resource. The domestic demand for helium was very low and international sales were restricted. Over the years this turned into a huge reserve and was always the world’s largest since
gas fields in North America had the vast majority of known helium to extract. Starting in the 1980s the reserve was considered an economic asset, the demand was much higher, and helium began to be sold off more readily depleting the reserve. One thing leading to the rapid depletion was that almost all of the helium was wasted. Goodyear would reprocess the helium used in their blimps, but as long as it was inexpensive most users of helium simply exhausted the stuff into the atmosphere even if recovery processes were possible. We’ll never see any of the helium that was put into toy balloons over the years and most other commercial and military uses of helium in blimps and balloons. All the helium used for underwater breathing systems will never be recovered. All the helium used in welding processes until recently was lost and only large welding manufacturers do any recovery. There are numerous scientific instruments that have used helium and for years simply exhausted the inexpensive gas into the atmosphere.
Helium released into the air rises up into space, none of that will ever be recovered.
When I was in grad school, our physics lab building was outfitted with a system of pipes intended to trap helium that boiled off so that it could be reclaimed and re-used.
It wasn’t in operation. It wasn’t economically feasible – helium was too cheap.
One day it will be necessary. Helium boils off or is released from balloons, rises to the top of the atmosphere, and is eventually energized by solar particles or energetic photons enough to start climbing out of our gravity well.
But helium is essential for lots of ultra-low temperature research and applications, and nothing else will do, not even hydrogen.
You can store helium and re-use it in things like helium refrigerators (not dilution refrigerators, but essentially a regular refrigerator that uses helium as the cooling medium). This is a nifty device that lets you regularly get to temperatures as low as 14K without having to boil off scads of precious liquid helium (helium has practically no heat capacity, so you have to use a lot of it in cooling things down).
But helium is a very tiny atom, and it can easily find its way through leaks that would stop any other gas. It’s very hard to avoid losing helium, even if you’re trying very hard.
It wasn’t just the German zeppelins that used hydrogen for lift. All the early aeronauts in their balloons basically filled them by shoveling iron filings into hydrochloric acid to make hydrogen. Helium balloons had to wait until there was a substantial helium industry to supply them, and balloons that used hot air were relatively rare. All the balloons I’ve been researching recently in the first decade or so of the twentieth century were necessarily hydrogen balloons.
And some of the operators shot off fireworks from the baskets!
The other important things to realize are
- helium forms (almost) no chemical compounds, so the only helium atoms out there in any appreciable amounts are in helium gas.
- helium is light enough that an appreciable amount of it is lost to outer space by the individual molecules reaching escape velocity.
So once it’s gone it’s gone.
Sure. It’s the main product of stellar fusion, and with a bazillion stars out there, there is indeed quite a bit of it in the cosmos as a whole.
There is, however, scant fusion taking place here on Earth. Terrestrial helium comes mostly from decay of radioactive elements; that’s a process that’s been going on for as long as the earth has been around, but now we’re extracting and using it at a prodigious rate. Once it gets pissed away into the atmosphere, it tends to leave the planet, so for our purposes, it’s best regarded as a non-renewable resource worth of careful management; we don’t want to lose our ability to (for example) perform MRIs in the future because we blew our helium reserve on party balloons.
Most parade balloons, too, but it’s still probably pretty lossy.
The helium in all the Macy’s parade balloons is simply released. It’s a terrible waste (the parade is a significant global user of helium), but I guess it’s just not worth capturing.
Before I replied, I did a quick search and found a number of references to helium recovery from the Macy’s balloons, specifically a partnership with Linde. However, they were from 2007 or so and do see more recent sources that say it’s simoly released. Sorry future generations!
It’s weird that they’re not called parade floats.
So how far are we from being able to produce helium? Is it even possible right now aside from using experimental methods in tiny quantities, or do we have to wait for someone to master fusion?
Alpha particles are helium. So you can just let stuff decay and capture the output, though it’s very small quantities.
More likely, if the normal reserves run out, we’ll have to use atmospheric capture of helium. It’s about 5 parts per million. That’s small, but a lot of air is processed industrially to make liquid nitrogen and oxygen, and the remainder can be processed for the helium (I’m not sure this is done today anywhere).
It’s still a small amount, and uneconomical for party balloons and the like, but with care it should be enough for scientific research and medical applications. I don’t expect there to be a point where we simply can’t run MRI machines because there’s no helium.
Speaking for myself, the best party balloons are not filled with helium. They are inflated with atmosphere and then twisted into neat shapes.
(Would’ve been neat to finally inflate that remote control mylar shark though. sigh)
Probably not commercially viable.
Parade floats travel on the ground.
Linde attempted to recover it 2008, but the process was expensive, and there wasn’t time to do it before the streets had to be opened for traffic again.
Yeah, parades and party balloons can be pointed to as a visibly frivolous waste of a resource, but it’s actually a pretty small fraction of world helium use. Cryogenic applications and inert atmospheres are larger, in particular MRI machines. Better recovery of helium in those segments helps immensely.
Most of the applications of helium should seemingly be recoverable. One that isn’t is weather balloons, which ascend into the atmosphere until they burst. Those can be filled with hydrogen, and sometimes are, but organizations launching them often opt for slightly less lift in return for a safer gas to handle when filling the balloon.
Fractional distillation of liquid air makes helium A LOT more expensive. Price is probably the ultimate remedy for encouraging recovery or finding other resources to use.
Last year I remember reading about Saskatchewan’s potential wealth in terms of (1) pea protein production and (2) helium reserves. I’m taking a wait and see attitude.
Most helium in the universe was produced in the Big Bang. Stellar fusion is a distant second source. But virtually none of the helium on Earth came from the BB or from stellar fusion.
They get some in the waste tanks at the Hanford Site. Not sure how much. They’re mostly worried about hydrogen buildup, not helium.
Given that people really like party balloons and parade balloons, what other gas can be used for those purposes? Hydrogen is probably not a popular solution since people will have visions of the Hindenburg disaster. My understanding, though, is that hydrogen isn’t that easy to set off – the Hindenburg had some unique circumstances, like the paint on its skin, that helped it along.
Is nitrogen a good gas for party balloons?
Nitrogen is too heavy. A large enough balloon made from very thin material would just barely float in air (average molecular mass of 28 vs. 28.8), but an average sized latex balloon would not.
There really aren’t any decent alternatives. Hydrogen is the only gas with similar (actually better) lift capacity. A party balloon full of hydrogen won’t kill anyone if it goes off, and likely wouldn’t set off a fire even indoors, but a large enough quantity could do some damage.
Neon could work, but it’s not going to be any cheaper than helium.
Hot air obviously works in some circumstances, but not for party balloons.