Are we going to run out of helium due to an economically ignorant law? This could affect the cost of spaceflight operations. It would be ironic if we end up going to the moon not for He3, but He4.
It seems to me that if they really wanted to privatize the federal reserve, they should have sold it off to a private bidder, rather than selling the helium at an arbitrary rate.
Thank you President Jimmy Carter. Jerk.
Jimmy Carter? Huh? We are talking about 1996 not 1976.
The Helium Privatization Act of 1996 was passed by a Republican controlled Congress and signed by Bill Clinton.
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ocga/laws/PL104_273
Goldline ad: forget gold, forget silver, helium is poised to skyrocket in price. For a limited time, we are filling our coins with helium from U.S. reserves. Get yours now before it’s all gone.
Here’s a graph of helium held and sold.
I can’t reach the other link.
Yes, another great example of the “success” of privatization, the destruction of a resource the government managed well for over 70 years (1925-1996).
BTW there is a second part to this. It costs money to extract Helium from the natural gas, but that was not a problem when the government bought it from you. But with the reserve being sold off the incentive to extract also disappeared.
So not only have we lost the Helium in the reserve, but also the Helium that would have been added to it. This is also why selling the reserve to a private bidder would not have worked out much different. The bidder would need to manage it to make a profit, so they would be selling it off as well and probably not buying it either. Same result – A resource 4 billion years in the making destroyed in decades due to privatization.
seems to me that smart entrepreneurs would see this and buy low
also from wiki
the marcellus shale is a going to be a large source of ng production in the coming decades
Newrouter,
The problem is the cost of holding it will probably eat up any profits that aren’t lost due to the time value of money.
Yeah, the evil stupid market, just out to make a buck by putting this helium to productive use! We need more government protection! Bigger government involvement in keeping precious resources away from the private sector!
~~~
The problem is the cost of holding it will probably eat up any profits that aren’t lost due to the time value of money.
If that is the case, then how would the government do better?
OMG, I just realized, we can’t trust Republicans either, when they are in charge of things they don’t understand!
MPM,
[[[The problem is the cost of holding it will probably eat up any profits that aren’t lost due to the time value of money.
If that is the case, then how would the government do better?]]]
Because the government didn’t set up the reserve to make a profit. It set it up for reasons of national security to conserve a limited resource.
Trent Waddington,
Hmmm, you really don’t understand economics do you? Especially the limitations of markets…
Unregulated markets tend to exhaust a resource to extinction. Look at whaling industry, the cod fish industry, the passenger pigeon…
Because the government didn’t set up the reserve to make a profit. It set it up for reasons of national security to conserve a limited resource.
If it is still needed for national security then the USG could still do that. Is it?
hehe, what you have here is a stockpile which is being open to the market. Why wouldn’t you expect the price to be low? The question to ask is, why was it being stockpiled? and, why is it now not being stockpiled? If the answers to those questions are reasonable then step back and let the market extinguish the stockpile.
You’re actually bemoaning that something is cheap and calling on the government to jack up the price.. what’s wrong with you?
Unregulated markets tend to exhaust a resource to extinction. Look at whaling industry, the cod fish industry, the passenger pigeon…
We really miss those industries too. A passenger pigeon industry alone would have kept the real estate crash from happening. Honest. We could have turned all those below water homes into pigeon coops and add trillions to our GDP.
Yes, another great example of the “success” of privatization, the destruction of a resource the government managed well for over 70 years (1925-1996).
And you were edumacated where? The resource is being “destroyed” because government is selling helium well below market rate. Tell me what that has to do with privatization.
government is selling helium well below market rate
Ahh, I missed that part.. surely people are reselling it and making a killing then.
yea so most of this helium comes from ng production. the shale formations are holding vast quantities of helium at no cost to the gov’t
wiki
I suspect someone will now start a futures exchange for helium. We will not run out, short perhaps, but not out.
Ignorant nuclear physics question: is there such a thing as stimulated alpha emission and could such a thing be used to produce helium? I’m thinking of breeder reactions, but I’m not sure that makes sense.
Ahh, I missed that part.. surely people are reselling it and making a killing then.
I gather some finesse would be involved since government probably won’t sell to anyone who blatantly resells it for a large markup (or who would hoard it to sell later for a large markup). Looking at my statement some more, I’d have to say that government is probably setting the market rate, so technically it is selling at market rate. But I doubt anyone who is buying is allowed to anticipate (via hoarding) how much the price will rise after the government stock runs out.
The problem is the cost of holding it will probably eat up any profits that aren’t lost due to the time value of money.
I don’t quite agree since it appears that government dumping will end in the near future (by 2015). There is some penalty from time value, but that’s a relatively short horizon. I think worse problems are the infrastructure cost and uncertainty about future government action.
Helium is a hard gas to store and it’s hard to make a business case for building specialized tanks to store helium (or finding your own salt dome) when you don’t really know what’s going to happen when the federal supply gets cut off. For example, government could use eminent domain to obtain more supplies (not necessarily of yours, it could be a willing partner getting many times their investment back) and figure out some way to continue dumping helium (which would increase those time value costs by an unknown amount).
Probably what makes the most economic sense is for anyone who currently extracts helium with natural gas and vents it to the air to instead pump the helium back into the ground. Maybe a larger scale operation could find a nearby depleted natural gas pocket to refill with helium. Any heavy consumption applications (particularly cryo cooling) might have alternative technologies that makes sense at higher helium costs.
Doh, Thomas, you said “cost of holding it”. That’s most of my disagreement lost right there.
I’ve wondered if Venus might be a good place to get helium, in the extreme situation where it becomes unavailable on Earth. One could lower an evacuated pressure vessel into the Venusian atmosphere. Place on the vessel a membrane permeable to helium but not the other gases. Helium would gradually diffuse through the membrane until the vessel was filled with the gas at close to the ambient pressure.
I do wonder what the 3He/4He ratio is there. The solar wind can come right down to the top of the atmosphere (no planetary magnetic field), so it’s possible solar helium is getting mixed in.
Unregulated markets tend to exhaust a resource to extinction. Look at whaling industry, the cod fish industry, the passenger pigeon…
Another thing to note here is that these resources above aren’t recyclable. Try recycling a right whale after it’s been turned into whale oil and burned. The value of the whale oil vanishes when it gets burned. Most of the value of helium remains even after it’s used. There are some applications (such as disposable weather and party balloons) where the helium is gone for good. But most cryo applications could store the boiled off helium.
Ignorant nuclear physics question: is there such a thing as stimulated alpha emission and could such a thing be used to produce helium?
Yes. It’s called fusion.
If Polywell fusion works with boron11 – protons there will be plenty of helium as a by product.
Mike, have you seen what LPP are doing as a side project?
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65&Itemid=83
Hey Boss, what do you want me to do with all these X-Rays? Gee, I dunno, sell em to homeland security? yuk yuk yuk.
Yes. It’s called fusion.
Anything we could do this side of fusion? What would happen if you bombarded lithium or boron with protons or neutrons? I’ve have no idea of the quantities involved. I vaguely recall reading that fusion would only produce tiny amounts of helium.
Thomas has it backwards. The GOVERNMENT is ignoring market forces and selling regardless of price. This is actually another example of the government skewing supply and demand to the detriment of the country. Something they’re really good at doing. The housing bubble and financial crash being the latest example.
Anything we could do this side of fusion? What would happen if you bombarded lithium or boron with protons or neutrons? I’ve have no idea of the quantities involved. I vaguely recall reading that fusion would only produce tiny amounts of helium.
Bombarding a cold (i.e., non-hot-plasma) target with ions is a losing game. Almost all the ions will be slowed down and stop without undergoing nuclear reactions, so the output will be far too low, by many orders of magnitude. As for neutrons: where do you get them? Neutrons from fission are far too expensive. If you get them from fusion, well, we’re back to fusion again.
Even fusion (if it could be made to work) would not be a terribly practical source of helium. Current helium consumption would require on the order of 100 TW of fusion output to sustain, which is higher than the total world rate of energy consumption for all uses.
I suspect helium will ultimately be extracted, at considerable cost, from deep non-fossil-fuel wells drilled expressly for the purpose of producing helium. It will be sufficiently expensive that it will only be used when absolutely necessary.
Is there a simple way to explain why producing helium by bombarding lithium or boron with neutrons from fission isn’t practical when fast breeder reactors are apparently a good way to produce reactor fuel? Or would I have to spend two years reading up on nuclear physics first? 😉
MPM: neutrons lose energy by collisions with nuclei, and are ultimately absorbed on nuclei. So, neutrons are highly effective at causing nuclear reactions. They can be absorbed by a nucleus even at very low energy — there is no electrostatic barrier keeping them out.
Shoot a beam of ions at a target at several million eV and almost all of them will slow down and stop without undergoing nuclear reactions. The ions, being charged, lose energy by scattering electrons and electronically exciting/ionizing target atoms. You might get a few ions out of a million causing nuclear reactions.
If you shoot VERY energetic protons (around 1 GeV) at a target, then they will primarily lose energy by nuclear collisions. Since the binding energy of a nucleon in a nucleus is around 8 MeV, these collisions shatter the target nuclei in a process called “spallation”. These interactions, and the collisions of secondary particles with additional nuclei, end up producing about 1 neutron per 60 MeV of input energy in thick targets of high atomic number materials. This is not sufficiently better than just using excess neutrons from a fission reactor to be all that attractive as a neutron source, except in specialized applications.
Ack, misred your comment.
The reason using NEUTRONS from fission to make helium isn’t practical is that neutrons are too expensive.
Thanks for both comments! I wonder why neutrons from fission are too expensive to produce helium but not too expensive to produce reactor fuel. Maybe just because reactor fuel is very expensive to begin with and helium is currently very cheap?
MPM: that’s right, except that making reactor fuel with neutrons isn’t really economical either! Natural uranium prices would have to go up by at least an order of magnitude before breeder reactors would begin to be competitive with ordinary once-through burner reactors. Even reprocessing today’s commercial reactor fuel isn’t economical.
And we do make helium with neutrons, btw. The isotope 3He is made by bombarding lithium with neutrons, making tritium, which decays into 3He. 3He is extremely expensive.
Over on nsf.com we had a discussion about alternatives for helium for LOX/LH2 propulsion, specifically using a (more cumbersome) combination of GH2 and N2 for purging:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=21277.210
It also turns out that there is another terrestrial source of helium: the atmosphere. Very expensive, but not impossible.
The Wikipedia article on tritium contains some good information on all this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium#Production
Some quotes to illustrate just how expensive all this is:
* The Ontario Power Generation’s “Tritium Removal Facility” processes up to 2,500 tonnes (2,500,000 kg) of heavy water a year, and it separates out about 2.5 kg of tritium, making it available for other uses.
* This means that the release or recovery of tritium needs to be considered in the operation of nuclear reactors, especially in the reprocessing of nuclear fuels and in the storage of spent nuclear fuel. The production of tritium was not a goal, but rather, it is just a side-effect.
* According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research report in 1996 about the U.S. Department of Energy, only 225 kg of tritium has been produced in the United States since 1955. Since it continually decays into helium-3, the total amount remaining was about 75 kg at the time of the report.
If all the air separation plants currently in existence around the world were modified to capture and separate all the helium passing through them, it would provide about 1% of current He consumption.
MPM
[[[Because the government didn’t set up the reserve to make a profit. It set it up for reasons of national security to conserve a limited resource.
If it is still needed for national security then the USG could still do that. Is it?]]]
Yes, and that is what the scientists in the article are basically calling for, that Congress reverse this mistake and restore the strategic reserve.
Bill Maron
[[[Thomas has it backwards. The GOVERNMENT is ignoring market forces and selling regardless of price. This is actually another example of the government skewing supply and demand to the detriment of the country. Something they’re really good at doing. The housing bubble and financial crash being the latest example.]]]
You comment makes no sense. The government is disposing of the Helium reserve it built up over 70 years by a control sale of the assets over two decades. Markets work base on information and knowing X number of tons will be released into the market over specific time period makes the market very predictable over that period.
As for the housing and financial crash, the basic cause of both were the deregulation of the banking industry, allowing banks to pursue higher risk levels which they did by investing heavily into derivatives and the refusal of Alan Greenspan to regulate the derivative markets.
Unregulated markets are prone to wild swings because markets are reactive not proactive to events. Combined with the information lag the result is to create self reinforcing spirals both upward and then downward, as was common before the Great Depression. As proof of the benefits of PROPER regulation consider that the largest economic expansion in history took place between the mid-1930’s, when regulations and restrictions were placed on the financial industry and the early 2000’s, immediately after those regulations on the financial industry were relaxed or eliminated.
newrouter
{{{ The problem is the cost of holding it will probably eat up any profits that aren’t lost due to the time value of money.
yea so most of this helium comes from ng production. the shale formations are holding vast quantities of helium at no cost to the gov’t]]]
Until gas drilling operations extract the natural gas and the Helium in it. So one solution would be to ban natural gas production in the Texas Pan Handle so the Helium stays were it is.
Karl Hallowell
[[[Unregulated markets tend to exhaust a resource to extinction. Look at whaling industry, the cod fish industry, the passenger pigeon…
Another thing to note here is that these resources above aren’t recyclable. Try recycling a right whale after it’s been turned into whale oil and burned.]]]
No, but they are sustainable if properly managed.
Yes, Helium is recyclable in some uses, so one likely solution when we run out would be to ban it for the uses where its not recyclable. Which would include balloons and Rockets. Which is why space advocates should be worried about this. Or start looking for a substitute.
newrouter
[[[wiki
Helium is found in large amounts in minerals of uranium and thorium, including cleveite, pitchblende, carnotite and monazite, because they emit alpha particles (helium nuclei, He2+) to which electrons immediately combine as soon as the particle is stopped by the rock. In this way an estimated 3000 metric tons of helium are generated per year throughout the lithosphere.]]]
Do you have any concept of the size of the Lithosphere? Basically its the entire portion of the Earth between the Mantel and surface.
Correct, That should be the Mantle
Yes, and that is what the scientists in the article are basically calling for, that Congress reverse this mistake and restore the strategic reserve.
Well, their actions suggest they do not see a strategic interest. Are they wrong?
“Look at whaling industry, the cod fish industry, the passenger pigeon…”
Whales, cod fish, and passenger pigeons aren’t owned. Pigs and cows are, and they are on nobody’s endangered species list.
Helium can be owned. If prices really do skyrocket, dadgum natural gas outfits will start supplying it for profit. Price will reach an equilibrium. Drilling is a mature technology with mostly sensible environmental regulations, and natural gas burns pretty clean, so this doesn’t sound like a bad outcome.
MPM,
Back in the day when privatization was the rage Congress didn’t worry about the strategic issues. After all, they seriously believed that hordes of private Helium producers would raise up and provide all the supply needed from magical new sources.
As helium becomes more expensive industrial users will recycle more efficiently and others will go without. Their is no need for the government to save the day (like they could in any case?)
As for the housing and financial crash, the basic cause of both were the deregulation of the banking industry
Wrong. You are completely ignoring the CRA.
Yes, boom and bust does happen. The solution is to open up competition so more people can be in the banking business. Then when a bank fails what is the result?
The guys making the bad decisions at that bank are out of a job. This is all the regulation you need. Are we crying about the customers that lost money? That’s why they shouldn’t keep all eggs in one basket. Deposit insurance? Sure, but don’t make it so big that people aren’t encouraged to diversify.
The only legitimate action of the national government is national defense. The commerce clause was a [good intentioned] mistake made by our founders. Not that congress wouldn’t have found another way to screw with peoples lives.