Yes.
I know all that. The point was all the extra helium we have released into the atmosphere aint going anywhere anytime “soon” (or is it?). I wonder how much the atmospheric helium concentration HAS increased since all this fossil fuel usage became all the rage with humans? I guess one of my implied points was “more expensive” is better than “we don’t have any anymore”.
It would be part of the 13% “Other” in this graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HeliumUsePieChart1996.jpg
Presumably it is less than the 3% explictly listed for diving (breathing mixtures)
Figures from different sources don’t agree, but some recent articles say that 7% goes to to filling balloons, which includes weather balloons and military reconnaissance balloons.
Here’s a chart showing consumption by year to 2005. You can note that “diverse” applications (including lifting) are much lower than technical or cryogenic applications:
http://th.physik.uni-frankfurt.de/~scherer/Blogging/Helium/helium_usage.jpg
Note that US consumption has been dropping in the 21st century. A lot of that probably has to do with better recycling and reuse.
Weather balloons can be filled with hydrogen - some are. Hydrogen used to be more common - helium became more popular for weather balloons because of the greater safety in handling vs. some added lift from the hydrogen. If helium gets expensive, they probably go back to more hydrogen filled weather balloons, and take the necessary safety precautions when filling them.
That often-shown chart is a tad out of date, too, since the figures are from 1996. That’s why I brought up the “7% for balloons of various types” figure I’ve seen a couple places.
There doesn’t seem to be an organized commodity market for helium. The investment press suggests two ways to play the helium shortage:
1 - through investment in natural gas producers, as helium may become more of a primary drilling target and less of a byproduct.
2 - through the suppliers, the two major ones being Praxair (PX) and Air Products (APD).
That’s a shame. Investing in the NG producers doesn’t seem like too bad an option since at least they own reserves, but I don’t see much point in investing in the suppliers unless they have some very long-term source contracts.
I guess some of the air distillation companies might be another option, but I suspect it’ll be a while before that becomes a competitive source.
Bumped.
Congress is acting to avert a helium shortage: HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost
Another use for helium not mentioned here is in low-temperature physics. My father is an experimentalist and has run into problems as his grants are fixed amounts for three years, but when the price for helium rises he can’t go back for more money. I could ask him, but my WAG is that the total worldwide experimental need is dwarfed by the balloon industry, but nevertheless physicists are affected.
And to Nuclear Physicist’s point, I’m afraid that market forces aren’t going to make other gasses more attractive to low-temperature physicists. They don’t use helium because it’s so cheap, but because it has properties that make it ideal for experimentation at near zero Kelvin.
So far as I can see that bill is doing the exact opposite. The criticism against sales from the National Helium Reserve was that the bill essentially mandated an unrealistically low price, as they wanted to recoup the 1.3 billion in a short time. So the market was flooded and prices dropped. The worry was that continued cheap prices would deplete the reserve, and make measures to reduce waste of Helium uneconomic. With the debt paid, prices should revert to prices that reflect the cost of production, and things should stabilise. But this bill continues to undercut prices and will continue the availability of cheap helium. Avoiding a massive jump in prices is a good idea, but the effective subsidy of a market suppressing price by the US is not a good long term thing. I wonder if someone could challenge this in the WTO.
The other question is whether they will start putting Helium back into the reserve.
100 years? Science is WAY ahead of that already.
Sorry Francis Vaughan, I see that you did in fact mention low-temperature physics and I missed it.
Here’s another usage of helium graph (2002):
http://www.stratosolar.com/uploads/5/6/7/1/5671050/29_challengestoheliumsupply111003.pdf
(page 4)
That one lists “Balloons and Blimps” as 16%, and the paper goes on to say that blimps are a minor component and most of the balloon usage is in the US.
This came up in another post (forgot the subject, something about removing the skin from a helium balloon). Chronos explained it well that time, too.
That really rocked my world, because although I was a chemistry major, I hadn’t thought deeply on that point before. I guess had I thought we lived in a mixture of gases due to atmospheric mixing without really thinking it through (although I do remember a nagging itch at the back of the brain any time I started to ponder…).
This would also raise the price of those do-it-yourself mail-order suicide kits beyond the reach of all but the most well-insured.
(Or, we could go dipping bucketsful of helium from the Sun, sort of like this.)
HAAA, HAAAA, HAAAAA, ROFLSHISMT (Rolling On Floor Laughing So Hard I swallowed My Tongue)
I thought it was Rolling On Floor Laughing So Hard I Shit My Trousers.
