We ordered a couple of those helium things with nozzles to fill up balloons for the First of May celebrations in a few weeks’ time. My friend and I started thinking about this, and realized neither of us know where they actually get the helium from. It’s an element, it’s not like they make it by combining other gases. But do they get it by a chemical reaction of some sort? Do they distill it from somewhere? From air?
They mine it - seriously. 
There are underground gas pockets that contain helium and methane - the methane is burned as natural gas, and the helium is seperated out to fill up balloons with.
But for how much longer?
From Helium - Wikipedia
All atmospheric Helium will escape the atmosphere. It is chemically inactive, so cannot be chemically isolated form anything else. All earthbound Helium is produced by radioactive decay deep in the earth (an alpha particle acquires two electrons to form Helium), and can be trapped in the same deposits that trap natural gas. So this is where Helium is obtained from.
Si
Could you not get it from the fractional distillation of air?
Albeit at a higher cost than it’s currently mined for.
Wow…you guys deliver again. Thanks!
Wiki again: “In the Earth’s atmosphere, the concentration of helium by volume is only 5.2 parts per million”.
I don’t know that that would be feasible, but am prepared to be proved wrong. I guess if the underground reserves ran out then it could become viable.
Helium is only 0.000524% of air ( Air Composition at Sea-Level ). You’d have to go through a lot of air to get enough helium to do anything with.
And, since it doesn’t combine with anything, the only way to get it out is by freezing it out, and getting rid of everything else that froze first. It’s awfully hard to get temperatures that low. They generally use helium refrigerators and a lot of power. It’s definitely easier to find it trapped in impermeable reservoirs atop oil deposits (where it forms as a result of a radioactive decay chain, and collects becauise there’s nowhere else to go.)
The reason there’s so little in the atmosphere is that helium is extremely light, of course. It tends to go right up to the top of the atmosphere, whrere it eventually gets kicked by solar particles or cosmic rays and acquires energy to go higher out of earth’s potential well.
Many years ago there was concern that we should be conserving our helium supply, and some universities (like the one I was at) built helium systems meant to recollect the helium boiled off by helium cryostats and the like, but by the time I got there these were no longer in use. The price of helium was just too low to justify the effort. Heck, we’re still using helium to fill balloons and giant Thanksgaving Day floats – not exactly the way you’d treat a precious and rare resource. It might come back to haunt us yet. Helium is practically essential for ultra-low-temperature work, and even with the work on high T[sub]c[/sub] superconductors, there’s still a need for ultralow cooling. When the helium runs out, are we gonna mine the gas giants?
Isn’t it produced in nuclear reactors?
Yes, but it is not generally economic. The figures I have seen suggest there is about 7% helium in sime natural gas sources whereas it is only about 1 part in 200000 in the atmoshere.
Mind you is you think ordinary helium (helium-4) is a scarce resource, how about helium-3. Helium-3 (a helium nucleus with only one neutron) is thought to be an ideal fuel for a second generation of fusion power plants but it only makes up one part in 10 million of the helium mined from natural gas. This makes it potentially so valuable that it may be worth mining it on the moon and shipping it back to Earth!
It is (via alpha decay) but the concentration is low and with the additional hassle of dealing with radioactive material (and the Radon it would be mixed with is also radioactive), it would probably be much less economic than atmospheric isolation.
The most logical solution to a shortage is just to identify additional non-US gas streams that are economic and set up Helium isolation units. But the current cost of He is so low that the financials probably don’t make it worth while. So we will have to run low on He, have the cost go way up, and then it will be financially viable for someone else to extract. That’s economics for you :rolleyes:
Si
Mentioned above, but not slammed home as hard as it should be:
Helium on Earth is nothing more or less than the product of a few billion years of alpha radiation trapped in the right geologic formations. A fossil fuel, as it were. The neat thing is, if we really DO run out (that might not be anytime soon:)), there’s no replacement. NONE. NOTHING can mimic the physical properties of helium; think serious refrigeration. Not even hydrogen.
What a tragedy it will be, when children are no longer able to make prank phone calls using that magical gas to give them funny voices…
Yeah, but it really won’t be a problem, because one of the wealthy nations will invade a poor, but helium-rich nation ostensibly for a completely different reason (WMD-wielding terrorists, oh noes!) and take the last remaining stockpile of helium for themselves. Which turns out to be a terrible mistake, because every other nation will attack to take the helium hoard for themselves. The resultant nuclear exchange wipes out all the children, therefore eliminating the need for helium balloons or prank phone calls.
Do we need helium? If we were to run out, what effect would it have on the world as we know it?
See, all you have to do is fuse millions of cubic feet of hydrogen, and viola! No more helium shortage problem.
Read my post #8. You really do need helium for ultra-low temperatures. You might try using hydrogen, but you can’t buold a hydrogen dilution refrigerator. And I suspect that ultra-low temps are going to be more important in the future.
No more hit taking so you can talk like a munchkin, for one thing.
Mars, hell. I gives us a reason to go to Jupiter to mine the stuff …
Actually, I’m curious how much more expensive fractional distillation of air would make it. That’s where we get other inert gases now, and neon is only in the atmosphere at concentration of about 3.5 times that of helium - still pretty skimpy, but neon is cheap enough for a variety of commercial uses.
No more fireball-proof Goodyear Blimp?