I read that helium comes from the Earth, is non-renewable and becoming in short supply. Could we run out?
The US helium reserves near Amarillo, TX may become depleted in 20 to 30 years. Those reserves are to be sold off to private industry by 2015, and represent most of the world’s READILY AVAILABLE helium. So, yes, there are concerns about a shortage.
Helium is mostly obtained from natural gas fields, where the helium created by decay of radioactive deposits in the Earth’s crust becomes trapped. If we can’t find any more this way, helium could be obtained the same way we do the other inert gases - neon, argon, krypton, xenon - from fractional distillation of liquid air. This, would, however, be far more expensive.
On a related note, is there a helium market (similar to the silver / gold market) where one could buy futures?
Don’t bother. It’s run by a bunch of clowns, and the bubble is about to burst.
Bravo
I thought they were already privatized by Reagan in the 80’s. Or am I mis-remembering this?
Hmmm… Amarillo is also where US nuclear weapons are refurbished. One bad accident, and Amarillo will blow higher than I ever woulda thought!
This is precisely what happened with rare earths. OMG we’re running out of neodymium. OMG. OMG. The weird thing is that when the price started to go up, we miraculously found more. It’s almost like someone is watching over us. 
Rest comfortably in His invisible hand.
It also has a restaurant where you they serve a 72oz steak dinner. If you eat the whole thing within an hour (including the sides) it’s free. Just to compound the magnitude of the loss.
The problem with rare earths is due to most of the world’s supply being from China, who doesn’t want to sell off its supply (the U.S. once had a rare-earth mine but it was shut down, but not because it ran out; prices became too low for them to profit, although they are now starting it up again). The same applies to many other resources, like oil; higher prices lead to new technology (but prices don’t necessarily go back down; the cost and energy to produce a barrel of oil is much higher now than 10 years ago, or 100).
In any case, I expect things like helium-filled party balloons will become rare once current stockpiles are used up; perhaps extraction from natural gas will increase but demand is much higher than production.
Hydrogen balloons for little kids probably would not fly.
Dunno, they might go over with a bang.
The “Helium Privatization Act of 1996” calls for the US to sell off the helium reserve by 2015. Clinton administration.
I was overstating a bit about “most of the world’s supply”. The US does hold about half the world’s supply. This piece says the world will run out in about 40 years:
Helium shortage? I once invented a process to make helium from hydrogen, but it put out so much excess energy as a byproduct that I didn’t think anyone would be interested. Maybe I should look for my notes.
A small side note, when the US decided helium was a strategic and military asset, they decided not to sell it to Nazi Germany. As a result, the Hindenburg, which was designed to use helium, instead used flammable hydrogen. Oh, the humanity…
One could probably argue that the reserves of helium are essentially the same as our reserves of natural gas. The vast majority of the Helium in those reserves is simply lost as we burn the natural gas. It costs too much to recover it. Once the natural gas runs out we run out of economic helium. The argument about the critical nature of helium is that natural gas is simply one of a large number of ways we find economic and convenient energy, and running out of that in 100 years or so is not that big a deal. (Clearly by then economics will have forced the world to find new energy sources 
) But the concomitant loss of economic helium is essentially irreplaceable. The likely price hike would be staggering. Fractional distillation of air would probably mean between a hundred and a thousand fold increase in price. This would make most superconducting devices uneconomic. More likely is a ten to one hundred times price hike, with much reduced production from otherwise uneconomic natural gas reserves, and the use of Helium recovery systems on all superconductors. That would still be a game changer.
Shutting down gas production from those natural gas wells that have high Helium content, and preserving them for a time when the Helium is worth more than the natural gas they hold would make sense.
This is a common offering restaurants in Texas. Last time I was there (many years ago, Dallas IIRC), we went to places there with similar offers.
There are plenty of superconductors now that don’t need liquid helium, and some even that can work with liquid nitrogen (which we’ll never run out of). There are, however, a number of other cryogenics projects that do need liquid helium.
And the big problem with the Hindenberg wasn’t the hydrogen; it was the thermite they used as a sealant in the envelope. The disaster would still have been about as bad if they had used helium.
If we get really desperate, we can always go to the moon and mine it there.
…or so my (slightly) wide-eyed NASA-optimist friend says, far too often.
:rolleyes: