Good interview on the subject on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast a few months back, "Now There's a Helium Shortage and It Affects More Than Balloons":
> Ripple effects from the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue to widen. There's yet another brewing shortage, this time in helium. While most people associate helium with balloons and funny voices, the element is used in a surprisingly wide variety of industrial settings, including semiconductor production, where its role in advanced lithography has been growing rapidly. But helium mining and exploration in North America has been practically non-existent for a variety of reasons. And while the US used to have a strategic helium reserve, the government started selling that down in the late 1990s. On this episode, we speak with Nicholas Snyder, the founder and CEO of North American Helium, which does helium mining in Canada. We discuss the properties of helium that make it so useful, as well as the difficulties of expanding global production and distribution.
The sale was required by law due to the the Helium Privatization Act of 1996, signed by Clinton. Amended in 2013 by the Helium Stewardship act which allowed it to be sold in an auction with funds credited to the Helium Protection Fund, signed by Obama. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_19...
1996 - Introduced by Republicans. Passed by unanimous consent in the House and Senate. [0]
2013 - Introduced by Republicans. Passed with 2 nay votes in the Senate, 1 in the House. [1]
Both parties allowed it to happen. In both cases it was veto-proof. Pointless to call out a president. Pointless to blame one party or the other. Both have overwhelming support for this.
Everything about politics has to have enough footnote and caveats to make people's eyes bleed... but boiling an act down to a single person is not appropriate unless they were the champion of it, or it's intended as a placeholder for the party.
It sounded odd to me that Clinton/Obama would champion this... It felt very free-market / Republican thing to do, especially with it being called the "Privatization Act"... So I looked for more info.
Sure enough, it was introduced by Republicans... But Democrats share full blame on this if you think it's wrong... and the measure passed by so much it's almost pointless to call out the president because -- as you noted -- if the president fought it, there probably wouldn't be unanimous consent followed by 98% approval on amendment. So again: Why call out the presidents and not the party numbers except to inflame?
If anything it was giving credit to the 2013 amendment. It's funny that you're debating my relatively innocuous post when there are a number of clearly inaccurate/irrelevant politically motivated posts in this same thread.
I am not meaning / attempting to attack you. I was curious about why two Democrat presidents were being called out on something that seemed like a republican-themed billk. Upon investigation, I saw they signed it -- yes, as you said -- but also even if they didn't sign it, or vetoed it, it would still have passed with 98 to 100% on congressional approval.
I felt this was an important fact, in our highly political time, to point out this was one of those bipartisan bills that made it through.
I could additionally add that the house and senate were Republican controlled during the initial act, so the fact it got to Clinton during split-branch control is additionally proof of the bipartisan nature... But I was attempting to be beef and fa tual, and the given information I felt was sufficient to convey this was bipartisan.
I would have preferred more facts with your initial comment. It would have saved me some research time... Since I did the extra work, I decided to share it to save someone else that effort.
> The 104th Congress passed the Act of Congress presenting the legislation to the United States President on September 30, 1996. President Bill Clinton enacted the federal statute into law on October 9, 1996.
> Both chambers had Republican majorities for the first time since the 83rd Congress in 1953.
People immediately trying to point fingers, it's all so tiresome. Ultimately Clinton could have vetoed but this was likely a bipartisan supported bill. Both sides of the government were generally for balancing the budget and winding down some of the excess spending and planning that went into the Cold War era mentality. The late 90s was the only time in my lifetime, I believe, that the deficit shrank. But of course, Your Team Was Responsible For All the Good Things and The Other Team Was Responsible For All the Bad Things from that era.
Meanwhile we vent 95% of extracted helium into the atmosphere as an inconvenient waste gas.
If it is so important, why aren't all our gas wells extracting that helium? It is hard for me to see this as a ploy for anything other than raising helium prices for the few companies that do extract helium.
In anything that helium is critical for, the helium cost is inconsequential compared to both the cost of the other equipment that uses it, and the value gained from using that equipment.
> If it is so important, why aren't all our gas wells extracting that helium?
Because until six months ago there was a cheap and convenient supply coming out of Persian Gulf states, and so its importance was not noticed (like so many other items that 'suddenly' became apparent when the supply was suddenly cut off).
> The current helium shortage is the fourth to occur since 2006 and is being caused by shutdowns at several major helium producers. The shortage has been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, as Russia is one of the world’s top suppliers of helium.
I have a friend who teaches chemistry at a well known university that can no long run some labs because the equipment to run them needs, you guessed it, helium. This has been a long running problem that the Iran war has exacerbated, but is by no means the cause.
Sufficiently long that in the TV Series “The Big Bang Theory”, one subplot involves the characters buying helium from a black market dealer to perform their experiments
I've heard Helium is a limited resource so if we have leaky wells here I think we should be preserving as much of that is possible, it's too bad it takes pressure from an unnecessary conflict to do the right thing here.
Right now, even with infinite money, you have no way to extract helium from Jupiter and return it to Earth. (To say nothing of the Sun!)
Maybe with a couple hundred more years of technological development...
Our moon itself is said to have ~1M tons of very valuable Helium-3 in surface deposits, but even that's nigh impossible to harvest commercially right now.
If you ask international relations scholars or people in the state department, they actually support the prevention of nuclear proliferation.
The general population typically are doves because they can't see the consequences 10-50 years out.
My PhD bud, a Bernie supporter, thinks we should have put boots on the ground by now. I generally agree.
I lived through North Korea getting nuclear weapons in my lifetime. Before they were the end of a joke, today we have to care about the opinions of that backwater. (And I read international relations structural realists as much as I drink coffee... The job of the hegemon is to maintain the status quo.)
Iran already wasn't working on nuclear weapons (a confident assessment by our intelligence community across the past 20+ years). The JCPOA then gave us the ability to verify that for ourselves. Then we (metaphorically) blew up that agreement, and (literally) blew up their leader who was firmly opposed to developing nuclear weapons, and the new one doesn't feel the same.
The JCPOA enrichment limits would have started to expire this year, and soon Iran could have completely legally enriched as much as it wanted - while getting hundreds of billions via JCPOA sanctions removal. Given what it took to get Iran to this state under sanctions, it would have been impossible to force it to renew the limits or give up anything on nukes. We'd have ended up with Iranian control of Hormuz at the very least, likely of Gulf as well.
Perhaps that's an acceptable cost of avoiding higher gas prices right now - except Iran would have had the capacity to decide these at will. It's a fair choice, but best to be aware of the consequences.
You don't think Iran would have renegotiated to extend it further? If not, why would they even bother top follow the agreement in the first place? The legality of what they do has never been a consideration, they are a sovereign nation.
>You don't think Iran would have renegotiated to extend it further?
Why would Iran want to do it? Iran could absolutely control Hormuz* and get a nuke at will** under the deal. At that point it can avoid sanctions by threatening the Gulf. Or demand other concessions for allowing the Gulf to operate. That's what it tries to do now, but from a much weaker position compared to the deal timeline.
* Take the real life prewar Iranian missile and drone strength, assume Iran had an extra couple of hundreds of billions to pour into it, no import limits by the UN, a less restive populace, etc.
** Breakout timeline being a week at most at end of expiry timeline. Probably the only way to keep the Gulf independent at that scenario would have been nuclear deterrence.
>If not, why would they even bother to follow the agreement in the first place?
Because Iran wasn't anywhere strong enough at the time to risk a war, but the existence of the agreement and general developments would have predictably changed the power balance in its favor.
>The legality of what they do has never been a consideration
Well, if you decide something is legal, it's much tougher to change one's mind and stop it later.
Iran has long said they're not working on nuclear weapons. However, they have built a large stockpile of particles of rich uranium, which is something completely useless to have unless you're planning on building nuclear weapons. This stockpile was built under the previous leader, who you are trying to claim was opposed to developing them, and yet he knew. who you are trying to claim was opposed to developing them and yet he knew.
Iran didn't have nuclear weapons, however for years they were only a few weeks away from having them. They had all the hard parts in place to build one. There's a reason to think they had plenty of experts who could do it. So far as we know they never actually built one but they absolutely could and this was done under the previous leader.
The general assessment on Iran has long been that they aim to become a nuclear threshold state (have the ability to make nuclear weapons quickly (~1y timeline or less) should they need to), but not actually acquire nuclear weapons for themselves.
They said they weren't working on nukes, and our intelligence community released assessments which agreed.
The level of enrichment they've been doing is higher than they need for power generation but it also isn't nearly enough to make nukes. A more reasonable explanation (given the assessments they aren't working on nukes) is that they were being deliberately provocative.
> So far as we know they never actually built one but they absolutely could and this was done under the previous leader
Right, they could, and didn't. Why? It was only 7 years from the discovery of fission to a proof of concept in the form of the trinity test. Either you assume a level of incompetence entirely divorced from Iran's efficacy on the international stage, or you accept they weren't trying.
Enrichment % is very misleading. Natural is about 0.7%. 3.5% is halfway to 90%. The distance from 60% to 90% is tiny.
That's because the distance is calculated using the quantity of raw material that needs to be filtered and not the enrichment percent, the more pure, the less material needed, hence smaller distance to 90%.
>Right, they could, and didn't. Why?
Some people worked hard to ensure the latter would be very inadvisable for Iran. Being so close isn't a stable equilibrium though.
Iran has domestic uranium deposits. They design and build their own centrifuges, and had thousands of such centrifuges during the JCPOA. It's basically impossible to denuclearize them or prevent them from building a rudimentary reactor or bomb, and it has been that way for at least two decades.
Diplomacy was a proven path to prevent Iran from reaching for nuclear deterrence. The plan worked well for America and Iran, which is probably what motivated Likud to escalate the situation and force them both to pick sides.
The world would be more safe if Iran had nuclear weapons (less American/Israeli/Saudi interventions in the middle east). They should have smuggled nukes from the collapsed soviet Russia or do whatever was necessary to produce nukes.
Nukes, (or thousands of artillery pointed at densely populated areas allied with a country with nukes) are the surest way maintain sovereignty in the mad world we live in.
The Saudis would then get nukes from Pakistan. The thought of MBS or a Wahhabism fanatic successor getting his hands on nukes is absolutely terrifying, far more than the Iranians or even Kim Jong Un.
I'm not really sold on the idea that nuclear weapons are a salve against conflict. The only real examples are North Korea not getting invaded and maybe tamping down some of the India-Pakistan conflicts (note that India and Pakistan have had armed conflict with each other since both acquired nuclear weapons!). On the contrary, we can see times where nuclear weapons seem to have emboldened leaders--Putin has definitely played the "you can't retaliate against my aggression, I'll nuke you" card, and the Cuban missile crisis had both the American and Soviet militaries stridently arguing for a nuclear first strike because going second would be so calamitous (it was avoided largely because both Kennedy and Khrushchev were reticent to do so).
One of the striking features of the last decade or so of global politics is the willingness of middle powers to arm and fuel regional conflicts, so I think it entirely plausible that a world where middle powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran gain nuclear weapons is one where, say, the Sudanese Civil War involves nukes.
> My PhD bud, a Bernie supporter, thinks we should have put boots on the ground by now. I generally agree.
I suspect that this belief has the same level of thought put into it as the "general populace". The crux of the issue is not Iran's nuclear proliferation, it's the hegemon's unreliability.
The US had the JCPOA, had allies for deterrence, and unilaterally decided to discard them in the name of inflation. One might argue that the electorate has decided that the US should no longer be a hegemon, and yet the administration still impose it's will on others.
There was a time when I believed that Iran was not a rational actor. That is not the case now. I can only hope that there are enough checks and balances to prevent other actors from acting too irrationally.
Most importantly, semiconductor fabs cannot operate without it. I was unaware, but I saw an interesting 60 minutes piece in it the other day.
I hear what you’re saying, but it’s the same reason a lot of natural gas is flared off or vented at oil wells. Helium is less than 1% of the total feed gas coming off a well and it requires specialized equipment to be able to recover it, on top of a way to distribute it. In most cases depending on the mix of gases coming out, it’s simply not economical for the operator.
Even with the supply being under pressure and prices going up from Qatar’s supply being cut off, that still might not be enough for companies to build the infrastructure. It would be a huge gamble. Once traffic in the straight of Hormuz goes back to normal that could be a losing proposition.
> If it is so important, why aren't all our gas wells extracting that helium?
Because the free market considers any supplier but the cheapest to be inefficient and drives them out of business. Robustness of the supply chain is always less profitable.
Whether helium or eggs or toilet paper, we keep getting shown the results of this lesson over and over. And people refuse to learn.
Helium-4 is what you get out of the ground with natural gas. Helium-3 is what you get from tritium. A combination of these two is what gives you really low cryogenic temperatures needed for quantum computing.
Canada produces a lot of He-4 from natural gas and a huge proportion of the worlds tritium in its heavy water reactors. Most countries that produce tritium and He-3 tend to hoard it, but Canada is selling it cheap. If the U.S. wants to be forward looking, they should talk to Canada about a long-term tritium and helium supply contract.
Edit: Of course, I would imagine it would be in the interest of other countries to do the same while Canada is placing a premium on non-U.S. partnerships.
After squandering the national helium reserve for years, because "lol free markets" ideology. It's crazy that we put that stuff into balloons for fun (helium is pretty abundant in the universe, but the economically viable sources are fossil).
> On Thursday, the U.S. government sold the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground stockpile based in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium.
> Once the deal is finalized, the buyer — which will likely be the highest bidder, the industrial gas company Messer — will claim some 425 miles of pipelines spanning Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, plus about 1 billion cubic feet of the only element on Earth cold enough to make an MRI machine work.
> ...
> The sale has been in the works for more than a decade. Congress first mandated it through the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. It was initially supposed to occur in 2021, but a series of delays — in part due to the same logistical and regulatory issues threatening shutdowns today — postponed the auction to Thursday.
> ... Since 2013 the world's largest helium hub is no longer located in the United States of America but in Qatar, which produces 1.3 billion cubic feet of helium per year from a single project and meets 25% of the global demand. One challenge related to bringing new helium sources onto the market is that it usually requires venture capital financing. Another challenge is that the current selling price of U.S. Cliffside helium is too low to encourage more new producers to enter the field.
> in Qatar, which produces 1.3 billion cubic feet of helium per year from a single project
I get that it might be weird to talk about producing "tons" of a gas that will float away into space if not contained, but it must still be better than talking about the amount of volume of gas being produced.
How much helium is in one cubic foot? That's up to you.
> It's crazy that we put that stuff into balloons for fun
We barely do anymore; one of the main reasons the Party City chain went bankrupt was the sharp rise in the cost of helium. The other two were covid and private equity of course lol.
> The following year, the owners had Party City borrow $338 million to pay themselves a dividend.
FINALLY! Helium is for welding and science not goddamn party balloons, hydrogen party balloons sounds way more fun anyway (just keep them away from birthday candles).
To be fair the Executive Branch in the last 50 years seems to look at the Congresses' laws more as "recommendations that could be ignored if we really want to" and this would have been a perfect case to do so.
After decades of just dumping it on the market, despite knowing that it's essentially a non-renewable resource, we finally designate it a critical material. Talk about closing the barn door after the helium has escaped.
From what I understand there are many different grades of helium and the shortages (at least when I initially was looking in to them) revolved more around the higher grades.
Yes, there are. The Semiconducter stuff is 6 9's 99.9999, then there's UHP .9995 which is what I use, then .999 mostly welding I think? Then goes down from there. Most 'balloon' grade has some oxygen in it since people like to inhale it and talk funny, adding a little o2 keeps people from dying.
I have to interject here because I think this is a slightly dangerous claim.
Balloon helium is just helium, broadly, at 98%+ concentration. It has a tiny amount of atmospheric gas, mostly nitrogen, in it as there is no need to go too far with purifying it, but there is zero intention of making it any safer to inhale. It is basically accidental contaminants.
If you inhale 98%+ helium, the diffusion gradient reverses and oxygen floods out of your blood. Did this once as a kid and actually blacked out. This is functionally just as true at 98% helium with some nitrogen and a tiny amount of oxygen as it is with 99.9999% helium. The difference for inhalation is a wash.
Inhaling helium is not advised. The protection we have, such as in my case, is that invariably our rapid physiological response stops us from inhaling helium and oxygen can return.
It's all the same helium, of course, going through different levels of industrial purification. I only clarify this as it isn't like we find super pure reserves in nature and that's what is lucrative, but instead it's all the same contaminated helium and then it gets processed to further and further levels of purification, like many other industrial products.
If there is a shortage of helium, it's a shortage of all the same helium. But so long as it's treated as a novelty gas, and so long as it continues to just be wasted, it's hard to take claims of a shortage too seriously.
As a fun fact, the vast majority of helium on Earth is courtesy of the radioactive alpha decay chain starting from heavy elements like Uranium and Thorium. Helium got trapped by the same geological formations that trapped natural gas, hence why they're usually found together despite being from completely different processes.
I would've loved that as a kid. For that matter, I did actually fill some balloons with hydrogen using vinegar and something (might've cut some magnesium off one of those primitive fire starters, or I might've used a weaker metal, can't quite remember). I think I used the glass tube Costco used to use as a vanilla bean container to strap the balloon onto.
Zinc would've worked too, I might have clipped the corner off some pennies or something. Magnesium works too though, and I definitely had access to magnesium. It was awhile ago though, so I'm not sure what I did.
Yes, the sale only recently concluded, but it’s been in the works for decades. The most recent being The Helium Stewardship Act of 2013, which Congress passed and required the sell off to happen by 2021 or something.
C'mon... First, there's no infrastructure in the US to process the gas and purify to semi manufacturing levels. Second, as soon as the epstein war is done (either by Iran allowing navigation through Hormuz or the arab countries developing alternative routes), Helium orices will go back to be so low it doesn't make financial sense to purify unless you have the volumes they have. And by then, still no infrastructure would be ready for the task.
The oil reserve is so that when there's a war in the Middle East you have some period of time before you run out and encounter price shocks.
The helium reserve is so that when there's a war in the Middle East...
The US has drawn down on the first one substantially and sold the second one to the private sector a decade ago that had no interest in maintaining it.
There's a great episode about US helium by Planet Money from 2019 that tells the fascinating story of the US helium stockpile and how the shortage was created by government decisions.
In the air? That's the one place you can't find helium. The earth doesn't have enough gravity to hold it down; if it gets into the air, it escapes into space.
Any helium we have comes from underground, which is why you can see discussion of "mining" helium upthread.
While it is true that helium escapes from the atmosphere, it is also produced continuously in the Earth's crust.
Thus there is an equilibrium concentration of helium in air, from generation and loss, and it is greater than for the heavier noble gases krypton and xenon, which do not escape from the atmosphere.
So there is more helium in air than krypton and xenon, which are nonetheless extracted from air, despite their low concentration. However, their extraction from air is easier than for helium, because when liquid air is evaporated the lighter and more abundant gases evaporate first and krypton and xenon remain in the small liquid residuum.
The earth has plenty enough gravity to hold down helium. It's the rest of the atmosphere, being denser and heavier than helium, that counteracts earths gravity and forces it up to the top where solar winds dislodge it.
Good interview on the subject on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast a few months back, "Now There's a Helium Shortage and It Affects More Than Balloons":
> Ripple effects from the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue to widen. There's yet another brewing shortage, this time in helium. While most people associate helium with balloons and funny voices, the element is used in a surprisingly wide variety of industrial settings, including semiconductor production, where its role in advanced lithography has been growing rapidly. But helium mining and exploration in North America has been practically non-existent for a variety of reasons. And while the US used to have a strategic helium reserve, the government started selling that down in the late 1990s. On this episode, we speak with Nicholas Snyder, the founder and CEO of North American Helium, which does helium mining in Canada. We discuss the properties of helium that make it so useful, as well as the difficulties of expanding global production and distribution.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh...
The US had a strategic reserve, but it was sold off:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
The sale was required by law due to the the Helium Privatization Act of 1996, signed by Clinton. Amended in 2013 by the Helium Stewardship act which allowed it to be sold in an auction with funds credited to the Helium Protection Fund, signed by Obama. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_19...
1996 - Introduced by Republicans. Passed by unanimous consent in the House and Senate. [0]
2013 - Introduced by Republicans. Passed with 2 nay votes in the Senate, 1 in the House. [1]
Both parties allowed it to happen. In both cases it was veto-proof. Pointless to call out a president. Pointless to blame one party or the other. Both have overwhelming support for this.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_19...
1: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527/...
This over simplifies politics.
If Trump made a gigantic fuss about something that seems inconsequential, there would be more than 2 nay votes.
The Epstein files are the counter example of this.
The position in the United States to make sure people vote aligned is called Whip.
Given the makeup of Congress, and even myself as a chem engineer, I could see this as something easy to pass.
Sometimes I think we need more involvement from the deep state and less from people with nice looking hair.
Everything about politics has to have enough footnote and caveats to make people's eyes bleed... but boiling an act down to a single person is not appropriate unless they were the champion of it, or it's intended as a placeholder for the party.
It sounded odd to me that Clinton/Obama would champion this... It felt very free-market / Republican thing to do, especially with it being called the "Privatization Act"... So I looked for more info.
Sure enough, it was introduced by Republicans... But Democrats share full blame on this if you think it's wrong... and the measure passed by so much it's almost pointless to call out the president because -- as you noted -- if the president fought it, there probably wouldn't be unanimous consent followed by 98% approval on amendment. So again: Why call out the presidents and not the party numbers except to inflame?
If anything it was giving credit to the 2013 amendment. It's funny that you're debating my relatively innocuous post when there are a number of clearly inaccurate/irrelevant politically motivated posts in this same thread.
I believe you're mireading my statements.
I am not meaning / attempting to attack you. I was curious about why two Democrat presidents were being called out on something that seemed like a republican-themed billk. Upon investigation, I saw they signed it -- yes, as you said -- but also even if they didn't sign it, or vetoed it, it would still have passed with 98 to 100% on congressional approval.
I felt this was an important fact, in our highly political time, to point out this was one of those bipartisan bills that made it through.
I could additionally add that the house and senate were Republican controlled during the initial act, so the fact it got to Clinton during split-branch control is additionally proof of the bipartisan nature... But I was attempting to be beef and fa tual, and the given information I felt was sufficient to convey this was bipartisan.
I would have preferred more facts with your initial comment. It would have saved me some research time... Since I did the extra work, I decided to share it to save someone else that effort.
> This over simplifies politics.
No, it doesn't. "Passed by Clinton" and "Passed by Obama" are the statements that oversimplify politics.
> The position in the United States to make sure people vote aligned is called Whip.
That is also a gross oversimplification of our politics.
Keep in mind you're responding to someone called "myphpgothacked" whose accounted was created 11 hours ago.
Be wary of these.
We don't have to speculate; we know the republicans' positions on privitization and selling of assets during this period.
> The 104th Congress passed the Act of Congress presenting the legislation to the United States President on September 30, 1996. President Bill Clinton enacted the federal statute into law on October 9, 1996.
> Both chambers had Republican majorities for the first time since the 83rd Congress in 1953.
People immediately trying to point fingers, it's all so tiresome. Ultimately Clinton could have vetoed but this was likely a bipartisan supported bill. Both sides of the government were generally for balancing the budget and winding down some of the excess spending and planning that went into the Cold War era mentality. The late 90s was the only time in my lifetime, I believe, that the deficit shrank. But of course, Your Team Was Responsible For All the Good Things and The Other Team Was Responsible For All the Bad Things from that era.
AFAICT US is self-sufficient in Helium, no surprise US didn't bother keeping a reserve:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-helium.pdf
> Government sales flooded the market with cheap helium, causing much of the private helium industry to shut down
Very sloppy
>The US had a strategic reserve, but it was sold off:
Yes, you can read more about that here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50249073
Meanwhile we vent 95% of extracted helium into the atmosphere as an inconvenient waste gas.
If it is so important, why aren't all our gas wells extracting that helium? It is hard for me to see this as a ploy for anything other than raising helium prices for the few companies that do extract helium.
In anything that helium is critical for, the helium cost is inconsequential compared to both the cost of the other equipment that uses it, and the value gained from using that equipment.
> If it is so important, why aren't all our gas wells extracting that helium?
Because until six months ago there was a cheap and convenient supply coming out of Persian Gulf states, and so its importance was not noticed (like so many other items that 'suddenly' became apparent when the supply was suddenly cut off).
We've been having helium shortages for years:
> The current helium shortage is the fourth to occur since 2006 and is being caused by shutdowns at several major helium producers. The shortage has been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, as Russia is one of the world’s top suppliers of helium.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/6/24/helium-shortage...
I have a friend who teaches chemistry at a well known university that can no long run some labs because the equipment to run them needs, you guessed it, helium. This has been a long running problem that the Iran war has exacerbated, but is by no means the cause.
Sufficiently long that in the TV Series “The Big Bang Theory”, one subplot involves the characters buying helium from a black market dealer to perform their experiments
I've heard Helium is a limited resource so if we have leaky wells here I think we should be preserving as much of that is possible, it's too bad it takes pressure from an unnecessary conflict to do the right thing here.
> I've heard Helium is a limited resource […]
I've heard the same thing about petroleum. :)
There are other sources of energy. With helium, once it's gone, there's nothing to replace it.
Well, there is; you can just wait for more helium to be produced underground. That's the same method that provided the helium we have now.
> Well, there is; you can just wait for more helium to be produced underground.
Funnily enough that seems to be the same idea for petroleum. :)
Jupiter's atmosphere is about 25% helium. And then there's the other gas giants, and the sun itself (also about a quarter helium)
We risk running out of cheap helium. But if you are willing to pay infinite money there is near-infinite helium
Right now, even with infinite money, you have no way to extract helium from Jupiter and return it to Earth. (To say nothing of the Sun!)
Maybe with a couple hundred more years of technological development...
Our moon itself is said to have ~1M tons of very valuable Helium-3 in surface deposits, but even that's nigh impossible to harvest commercially right now.
If you ask international relations scholars or people in the state department, they actually support the prevention of nuclear proliferation.
The general population typically are doves because they can't see the consequences 10-50 years out.
My PhD bud, a Bernie supporter, thinks we should have put boots on the ground by now. I generally agree.
I lived through North Korea getting nuclear weapons in my lifetime. Before they were the end of a joke, today we have to care about the opinions of that backwater. (And I read international relations structural realists as much as I drink coffee... The job of the hegemon is to maintain the status quo.)
Iran already wasn't working on nuclear weapons (a confident assessment by our intelligence community across the past 20+ years). The JCPOA then gave us the ability to verify that for ourselves. Then we (metaphorically) blew up that agreement, and (literally) blew up their leader who was firmly opposed to developing nuclear weapons, and the new one doesn't feel the same.
The JCPOA enrichment limits would have started to expire this year, and soon Iran could have completely legally enriched as much as it wanted - while getting hundreds of billions via JCPOA sanctions removal. Given what it took to get Iran to this state under sanctions, it would have been impossible to force it to renew the limits or give up anything on nukes. We'd have ended up with Iranian control of Hormuz at the very least, likely of Gulf as well.
Perhaps that's an acceptable cost of avoiding higher gas prices right now - except Iran would have had the capacity to decide these at will. It's a fair choice, but best to be aware of the consequences.
You don't think Iran would have renegotiated to extend it further? If not, why would they even bother top follow the agreement in the first place? The legality of what they do has never been a consideration, they are a sovereign nation.
>You don't think Iran would have renegotiated to extend it further?
Why would Iran want to do it? Iran could absolutely control Hormuz* and get a nuke at will** under the deal. At that point it can avoid sanctions by threatening the Gulf. Or demand other concessions for allowing the Gulf to operate. That's what it tries to do now, but from a much weaker position compared to the deal timeline.
* Take the real life prewar Iranian missile and drone strength, assume Iran had an extra couple of hundreds of billions to pour into it, no import limits by the UN, a less restive populace, etc.
** Breakout timeline being a week at most at end of expiry timeline. Probably the only way to keep the Gulf independent at that scenario would have been nuclear deterrence.
>If not, why would they even bother to follow the agreement in the first place?
Because Iran wasn't anywhere strong enough at the time to risk a war, but the existence of the agreement and general developments would have predictably changed the power balance in its favor.
>The legality of what they do has never been a consideration
Well, if you decide something is legal, it's much tougher to change one's mind and stop it later.
Iran has long said they're not working on nuclear weapons. However, they have built a large stockpile of particles of rich uranium, which is something completely useless to have unless you're planning on building nuclear weapons. This stockpile was built under the previous leader, who you are trying to claim was opposed to developing them, and yet he knew. who you are trying to claim was opposed to developing them and yet he knew. Iran didn't have nuclear weapons, however for years they were only a few weeks away from having them. They had all the hard parts in place to build one. There's a reason to think they had plenty of experts who could do it. So far as we know they never actually built one but they absolutely could and this was done under the previous leader.
The general assessment on Iran has long been that they aim to become a nuclear threshold state (have the ability to make nuclear weapons quickly (~1y timeline or less) should they need to), but not actually acquire nuclear weapons for themselves.
They said they weren't working on nukes, and our intelligence community released assessments which agreed.
The level of enrichment they've been doing is higher than they need for power generation but it also isn't nearly enough to make nukes. A more reasonable explanation (given the assessments they aren't working on nukes) is that they were being deliberately provocative.
> So far as we know they never actually built one but they absolutely could and this was done under the previous leader
Right, they could, and didn't. Why? It was only 7 years from the discovery of fission to a proof of concept in the form of the trinity test. Either you assume a level of incompetence entirely divorced from Iran's efficacy on the international stage, or you accept they weren't trying.
>It also isn't nearly enough to make nukes
Enrichment % is very misleading. Natural is about 0.7%. 3.5% is halfway to 90%. The distance from 60% to 90% is tiny.
That's because the distance is calculated using the quantity of raw material that needs to be filtered and not the enrichment percent, the more pure, the less material needed, hence smaller distance to 90%.
>Right, they could, and didn't. Why?
Some people worked hard to ensure the latter would be very inadvisable for Iran. Being so close isn't a stable equilibrium though.
Ah but the geniuses Trump and Netanyahu assassinated the Iranian leader who had issued a fatwa banning nukes as unislamic so now all bets are off.
Iran has domestic uranium deposits. They design and build their own centrifuges, and had thousands of such centrifuges during the JCPOA. It's basically impossible to denuclearize them or prevent them from building a rudimentary reactor or bomb, and it has been that way for at least two decades.
Diplomacy was a proven path to prevent Iran from reaching for nuclear deterrence. The plan worked well for America and Iran, which is probably what motivated Likud to escalate the situation and force them both to pick sides.
The world would be more safe if Iran had nuclear weapons (less American/Israeli/Saudi interventions in the middle east). They should have smuggled nukes from the collapsed soviet Russia or do whatever was necessary to produce nukes.
Nukes, (or thousands of artillery pointed at densely populated areas allied with a country with nukes) are the surest way maintain sovereignty in the mad world we live in.
The Saudis would then get nukes from Pakistan. The thought of MBS or a Wahhabism fanatic successor getting his hands on nukes is absolutely terrifying, far more than the Iranians or even Kim Jong Un.
I'm not really sold on the idea that nuclear weapons are a salve against conflict. The only real examples are North Korea not getting invaded and maybe tamping down some of the India-Pakistan conflicts (note that India and Pakistan have had armed conflict with each other since both acquired nuclear weapons!). On the contrary, we can see times where nuclear weapons seem to have emboldened leaders--Putin has definitely played the "you can't retaliate against my aggression, I'll nuke you" card, and the Cuban missile crisis had both the American and Soviet militaries stridently arguing for a nuclear first strike because going second would be so calamitous (it was avoided largely because both Kennedy and Khrushchev were reticent to do so).
One of the striking features of the last decade or so of global politics is the willingness of middle powers to arm and fuel regional conflicts, so I think it entirely plausible that a world where middle powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran gain nuclear weapons is one where, say, the Sudanese Civil War involves nukes.
>They should have smuggled nukes from the collapsed soviet Russia or do whatever was necessary to produce nukes.
The plan in Iran was always self sufficiency.
> My PhD bud, a Bernie supporter, thinks we should have put boots on the ground by now. I generally agree.
I suspect that this belief has the same level of thought put into it as the "general populace". The crux of the issue is not Iran's nuclear proliferation, it's the hegemon's unreliability.
The US had the JCPOA, had allies for deterrence, and unilaterally decided to discard them in the name of inflation. One might argue that the electorate has decided that the US should no longer be a hegemon, and yet the administration still impose it's will on others.
There was a time when I believed that Iran was not a rational actor. That is not the case now. I can only hope that there are enough checks and balances to prevent other actors from acting too irrationally.
Most importantly, semiconductor fabs cannot operate without it. I was unaware, but I saw an interesting 60 minutes piece in it the other day.
I hear what you’re saying, but it’s the same reason a lot of natural gas is flared off or vented at oil wells. Helium is less than 1% of the total feed gas coming off a well and it requires specialized equipment to be able to recover it, on top of a way to distribute it. In most cases depending on the mix of gases coming out, it’s simply not economical for the operator.
Even with the supply being under pressure and prices going up from Qatar’s supply being cut off, that still might not be enough for companies to build the infrastructure. It would be a huge gamble. Once traffic in the straight of Hormuz goes back to normal that could be a losing proposition.
If helium prices are raised by this won't that lower the threshold where it is considered a waste gas?
the transition from waste gas to wasted gas.
Helium is really hard to store and transport
> If it is so important, why aren't all our gas wells extracting that helium?
Because the free market considers any supplier but the cheapest to be inefficient and drives them out of business. Robustness of the supply chain is always less profitable.
Whether helium or eggs or toilet paper, we keep getting shown the results of this lesson over and over. And people refuse to learn.
Helium-4 is what you get out of the ground with natural gas. Helium-3 is what you get from tritium. A combination of these two is what gives you really low cryogenic temperatures needed for quantum computing.
Canada produces a lot of He-4 from natural gas and a huge proportion of the worlds tritium in its heavy water reactors. Most countries that produce tritium and He-3 tend to hoard it, but Canada is selling it cheap. If the U.S. wants to be forward looking, they should talk to Canada about a long-term tritium and helium supply contract.
Edit: Of course, I would imagine it would be in the interest of other countries to do the same while Canada is placing a premium on non-U.S. partnerships.
After squandering the national helium reserve for years, because "lol free markets" ideology. It's crazy that we put that stuff into balloons for fun (helium is pretty abundant in the universe, but the economically viable sources are fossil).
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-just-sold-heli... (2024)
> On Thursday, the U.S. government sold the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground stockpile based in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium.
> Once the deal is finalized, the buyer — which will likely be the highest bidder, the industrial gas company Messer — will claim some 425 miles of pipelines spanning Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, plus about 1 billion cubic feet of the only element on Earth cold enough to make an MRI machine work.
> ...
> The sale has been in the works for more than a decade. Congress first mandated it through the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. It was initially supposed to occur in 2021, but a series of delays — in part due to the same logistical and regulatory issues threatening shutdowns today — postponed the auction to Thursday.
---
The Helium Stewardship Act: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527
https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/helium/stew...
---
And its been on the "todo list of the federal government for decades"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_storage_and_conservatio...
> ... Since 2013 the world's largest helium hub is no longer located in the United States of America but in Qatar, which produces 1.3 billion cubic feet of helium per year from a single project and meets 25% of the global demand. One challenge related to bringing new helium sources onto the market is that it usually requires venture capital financing. Another challenge is that the current selling price of U.S. Cliffside helium is too low to encourage more new producers to enter the field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_19...
> in Qatar, which produces 1.3 billion cubic feet of helium per year from a single project
I get that it might be weird to talk about producing "tons" of a gas that will float away into space if not contained, but it must still be better than talking about the amount of volume of gas being produced.
How much helium is in one cubic foot? That's up to you.
> It's crazy that we put that stuff into balloons for fun
We barely do anymore; one of the main reasons the Party City chain went bankrupt was the sharp rise in the cost of helium. The other two were covid and private equity of course lol.
> The following year, the owners had Party City borrow $338 million to pay themselves a dividend.
FINALLY! Helium is for welding and science not goddamn party balloons, hydrogen party balloons sounds way more fun anyway (just keep them away from birthday candles).
> hydrogen party balloons sounds way more fun anyway
Basically equivalent at parties; much less fun for everyone involved in storing and transporting the hydrogen.
There is no science greater than party balloons, and funny sounding voices. =3
Can it work with hydrogen?
It can! :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhpF10H9G-M
It can work with Argon. "Luke, I am your Father."
well that explains a lot about Gemini
I thought during the last trump administration they got rid of the helium reserve and sold it all off? Or am I taking crazy pills?!
Yes, because the sale was mandated 2 decades ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_19...
To be fair the Executive Branch in the last 50 years seems to look at the Congresses' laws more as "recommendations that could be ignored if we really want to" and this would have been a perfect case to do so.
After decades of just dumping it on the market, despite knowing that it's essentially a non-renewable resource, we finally designate it a critical material. Talk about closing the barn door after the helium has escaped.
Yea, the sale of the federal helium reserve never made sense to me back in 2013.
https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-helium-system-sale-pro...
Messer American is in a good spot now I suppose:
https://www.blm.gov/announcement/blm-accepts-bids-sale-feder...
Lets hope this get my T bottle's lower than $675 each, it's almost 2x what I was paying last year.
I guess this explains why it cost me $60 to fill up a handful of birthday balloons a couple of months ago.
From what I understand there are many different grades of helium and the shortages (at least when I initially was looking in to them) revolved more around the higher grades.
Yes, there are. The Semiconducter stuff is 6 9's 99.9999, then there's UHP .9995 which is what I use, then .999 mostly welding I think? Then goes down from there. Most 'balloon' grade has some oxygen in it since people like to inhale it and talk funny, adding a little o2 keeps people from dying.
I have to interject here because I think this is a slightly dangerous claim.
Balloon helium is just helium, broadly, at 98%+ concentration. It has a tiny amount of atmospheric gas, mostly nitrogen, in it as there is no need to go too far with purifying it, but there is zero intention of making it any safer to inhale. It is basically accidental contaminants.
If you inhale 98%+ helium, the diffusion gradient reverses and oxygen floods out of your blood. Did this once as a kid and actually blacked out. This is functionally just as true at 98% helium with some nitrogen and a tiny amount of oxygen as it is with 99.9999% helium. The difference for inhalation is a wash.
Inhaling helium is not advised. The protection we have, such as in my case, is that invariably our rapid physiological response stops us from inhaling helium and oxygen can return.
Can't deny it's a funny way of dying, though.
It's only funny when clowns do it, obviously.
It's all the same helium, of course, going through different levels of industrial purification. I only clarify this as it isn't like we find super pure reserves in nature and that's what is lucrative, but instead it's all the same contaminated helium and then it gets processed to further and further levels of purification, like many other industrial products.
If there is a shortage of helium, it's a shortage of all the same helium. But so long as it's treated as a novelty gas, and so long as it continues to just be wasted, it's hard to take claims of a shortage too seriously.
As a fun fact, the vast majority of helium on Earth is courtesy of the radioactive alpha decay chain starting from heavy elements like Uranium and Thorium. Helium got trapped by the same geological formations that trapped natural gas, hence why they're usually found together despite being from completely different processes.
Will birthday balloons be filled with hydrogen instead? They would have a much stronger pull!
I would've loved that as a kid. For that matter, I did actually fill some balloons with hydrogen using vinegar and something (might've cut some magnesium off one of those primitive fire starters, or I might've used a weaker metal, can't quite remember). I think I used the glass tube Costco used to use as a vanilla bean container to strap the balloon onto.
Zinc and vinegar is what you're looking for. Our high school science class had us fill plastic pipette bulbs to make rockets.
Zinc would've worked too, I might have clipped the corner off some pennies or something. Magnesium works too though, and I definitely had access to magnesium. It was awhile ago though, so I'm not sure what I did.
If by "much stronger" you mean "less than 10% stronger"
A theoretical "vacuum filled" balloon would only be 16% more lift per unit volume than a helium balloon.
wasn't Ukrain also a major helium producer before the war (and this having caused issues when the war started)?
Not directly. It was a bit of a chain reaction.
1. Russia's invasion of Ukraine disrupted Europe's established natural gas supply.
2. Europe needed more gas from alternative suppliers, including Algeria.
3. Algeria sent more gas through its pipeline to Spain rather than processing as much gas into LNG at Arzew.
4. Less gas passed through the LNG process that made helium recovery economical.
5. Helium production fell, even though the underground gas deposits could still contain helium.
Getting Enron/PGE vibes from this timeline
wow if only the clinton admin hadnt sold off all our helium reserves years ago
Didn't they just sell like 80% of their reserve for pennies?
Edit: Yes, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-just-sold-heli...
Sold at a discount, then it becomes critical so its value gets a premium. What a coinkydink.
They choose the timing of each of those events with total freedom and independently.
Yes, the sale only recently concluded, but it’s been in the works for decades. The most recent being The Helium Stewardship Act of 2013, which Congress passed and required the sell off to happen by 2021 or something.
Oh no! My Helium!!
C'mon... First, there's no infrastructure in the US to process the gas and purify to semi manufacturing levels. Second, as soon as the epstein war is done (either by Iran allowing navigation through Hormuz or the arab countries developing alternative routes), Helium orices will go back to be so low it doesn't make financial sense to purify unless you have the volumes they have. And by then, still no infrastructure would be ready for the task.
The oil reserve is so that when there's a war in the Middle East you have some period of time before you run out and encounter price shocks.
The helium reserve is so that when there's a war in the Middle East...
The US has drawn down on the first one substantially and sold the second one to the private sector a decade ago that had no interest in maintaining it.
> C'mon... First, there's no infrastructure in the US to process the gas and purify to semi manufacturing levels
Not true. As an example, Air Liquide tanks take semiconductor grade pure helium from Ladder Creek in Colorado to international semi labs:
https://electronics.airliquide.com/who-we-are/our-markets/se...
https://tumbleweedmidstream.com/
(I noticed now because Colorado has a weird Natural Gas bill on the docket)
There's a great episode about US helium by Planet Money from 2019 that tells the fascinating story of the US helium stockpile and how the shortage was created by government decisions.
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751845378/episode-933-find-th...
You can literally find it in the air.
Like gold in beach sand.
It's everywhere. But extracting it is expensive and not very economical.
There's more water in the air than helium.
In the air? That's the one place you can't find helium. The earth doesn't have enough gravity to hold it down; if it gets into the air, it escapes into space.
Any helium we have comes from underground, which is why you can see discussion of "mining" helium upthread.
No that is false.
While it is true that helium escapes from the atmosphere, it is also produced continuously in the Earth's crust.
Thus there is an equilibrium concentration of helium in air, from generation and loss, and it is greater than for the heavier noble gases krypton and xenon, which do not escape from the atmosphere.
So there is more helium in air than krypton and xenon, which are nonetheless extracted from air, despite their low concentration. However, their extraction from air is easier than for helium, because when liquid air is evaporated the lighter and more abundant gases evaporate first and krypton and xenon remain in the small liquid residuum.
The earth has plenty enough gravity to hold down helium. It's the rest of the atmosphere, being denser and heavier than helium, that counteracts earths gravity and forces it up to the top where solar winds dislodge it.
Or the moon, or Uranus
Helium on the moon is much more interesting than helium on the earth.
Most of the helium on the Earth is from radioactive decay.
The helium on the moon, however, is from capture from solar wind... and has a higher concentration of helium 3. https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Futur...
> Apart from the traditional space-faring nations, the India has previously indicated its interest in mining the lunar surface.
What happened here? Does the European Space Agency not have anyone who can proofread an English document? Why are they publishing in English?