Congress Reaches Agreement ... On Helium
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Despite the wrangling that's resulted in a government shut-down, Congress managed last week to agree on one thing: Helium. Reader gbrumfiel writes: "The U.S. holds vast helium reserves which it sells to scientists and private industry. According to NPR, a new law was needed to allow the helium to continue to flow. Congress passed it late last week, but only after a year-long lobbying effort and intense debate (and in the end, Senator Ted Cruz opposed the measure). Can a new bipartisanship rise out of this cooperation? Or will hot air prevail on Capitol Hill? (Insert your helium joke here.)" Apparently, helium is not yet so scarce that it's not available in balloons at the grocery store.
Balloons (Score:4, Informative)
Children's balloons use recycled or low grade helium which can't be used for other more worthy purposes. It's not really a waste.
Re:Balloons (Score:5, Funny)
What could be more worthwhile than sounding like a chipmunk for 10 seconds?
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sounding like a chipmunk for 20 seconds.
Re:Balloons (Score:5, Funny)
Laughing at the guy who tried to sound like a chipmunk for 30 seconds, but passed out and fell over!
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I managed to get through the first verse of 'still alive' on one breath, but by the end of it the edges of my vision were turning green. I recognise this as the first sign that my brain really, really would like some more oxygen, so hurried the last few words and hastily commenced breathing.
Re: Balloons (Score:2)
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Please. If I have to sit through another Alvin and the Chipmunks movie I'll scream!
... in a high-pitched voice.
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According to August Strindberg, Iron and Sulfur [strindbergandhelium.com].
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..replace can't with "too expensive right now".
anyways, come up with that fusion already so there'll be some use for it.
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"Children's balloons use recycled or low grade helium which too expensive right now be used for more worthy purposes."
What?
Re:Balloons (Score:5, Funny)
As you know, gases are composed of atoms or molecules that are constantly bumping into one another. After a while these collisions can cause dents in the atoms causing them to lose their shine. While ok for balloons and such, medical and aerospace applications require new shiny helium atoms.
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It's called "balloon air". Supposedly it is the byproduct of helium used for scientific and medical purposes. It's not pure helium. Personally I'm not sure if this is lobbying or true. It certainly sounds plausible.
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I get that there's a lower grade of helium, but I can't make hide nor hair of what gl4ss was trying to say.
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Because you can still extract the helium from "low grade" sources - it's just not worth it unless you get a good return on the cost of extracting it.
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the helium in balloons isn't as far as I know any different isotope or magically soiled. just that purifying it costs a bit. it could be used for the purposes which require pure helium, if it was purified.
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If breathing it could kill you, I don't think it would be legal to use it for kids' balloons.. considering that people sue for the slightest things in the US.
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You sell them yes, but restaurants don't hand them out to kids to play with.. I hope :p
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> Out here in the Wild and Woolly World of America, we sell all sorts of dangerous things that can kill
> you if you breath them - we laugh at silly things like helium (and especially nitrous oxide). Hell son,
> we'll even sell you a gun.
all sorts of dangerous things, including guns are available just about everywhere in the world. Do you mean to imply people in other places do not use paints or glues? If so, then I certainly did not know that. Also, as far as drugs go, nitrous is pretty innocuous as
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Ah... What threw me off was that you quoted AmiMoJo rather than gl4ss. I wasn't sure what gl4ss was saying either.
Re:Balloons (Score:5, Informative)
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Children's balloons use recycled or low grade helium which can't be used for other more worthy purposes. It's not really a waste.
LOL!
It's not 100% helium, it's mixed with air to make it cheaper, but the idea that they couldn't separate it out is silly.
Also: What's "low grade" helium? Helium is an element, it's one of the few elements that can't be contaminated with anything - it has no stable compounds.
Separation? Medical/scientific helium is usually liquid. Helium liquifies at a different temperature than air so separation of helium from air would a trivial/automatic part of the cooling process (throw away everything that forms a pu
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You answered your own question; low grade helium has been mixed with air (or other gases). Not to make it cheaper; it is usually a waste product from other helium uses (and so it *is* cheaper than refined helium, but that's not the point).
And of course separation is possible, but it's more expensive than buying already-refined helium. This is because the US government has a large reserve of refined helium that it has been selling below cost for many years now, distorting the market.
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And helium cannot be enriched or purified? Is it really better to let a (practically) non-renewable resource escape into space than save it for when it becomes economical to refine?
Re:Balloons (Score:5, Interesting)
And helium cannot be enriched or purified? Is it really better to let a (practically) non-renewable resource escape into space than save it for when it becomes economical to refine?
Emphasis mine
That's exactly what's been happening. Most of the natural gas extractors decided that as long as the government was selling helium at a very low price, it wasn't economical to collect it. AFAIK, Exxon-Mobil has one major site in Wyoming and that's about it (and it's currently down for "maintenance"). Of course, this is complete crap - they just don't want to be bothered.
Currently the BLM charges $84 per million cubic feet of crude helium [blm.gov] (scroll halfway down the page or so). It takes ~27 cu.ft. of gas to make 1 liter of liquid. We get pretty good pricing and pay roughly $10/L of liquid helium. If we assume it costs $1 to purify and liquefy gas to make one liter, heck, if it costs $5 and the gas is only 50% pure, the "big 3" suppliers aren't losing any money and could easily pay more if the natural gas producers collected and sold the helium.
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Whew! Thank goodness we aren't wasting it on something frivolous.
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They also dilute it with air to make it even cheaper - just barely enough helium to lift the balloon and a little string.
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And the reason why the Hindenburg used hydrogen...
The U.S. Congress passed the Helium Control Act and Teddy signed it.
Almost 80 years later and gov't is still making a mess of things.
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The U.S. Congress passed the Helium Control Act and Teddy signed it. Almost 80 years later and gov't is still making a mess of things.
That's because Congress knows quite a bit about blowing hot air.
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Other inert gases like, say, Nitrogen?
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Sort of. The US government paid for a lot of helium to be extracted from natural gas and has been sitting on a big reserve for a long time. For a decade or so now they have been selling it below cost to encourage science applications etc. So the cost of extracting from natural gas is above the current 'market' price of scientific helium - but only because the 'market' is a single seller who is selling below cost.
What will happen when that reserve is exhausted is uncertain. The price of helium will rise,
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Helium isn't extracted from natural gas, per se.
Helium comes out of the ground alongside the natural gas (mixed with it, at a low percentage), and is separated from it, where it can be captured in sufficient concentrations.
Technically, it's a leftover waste or by-product of the process, but not all helium is captured (it requires infrastructure to capture and transport it) and a lot of it is simply vented away. If I recall correctly, there's a fractio
Re:Balloons (Score:5, Insightful)
It can be mixed with something else. Water isn't chemically degraded when it's mixed into sewage, either, but you don't go drinking it. You need to separate it first - or just drink other water that's already pure, since it's cheaper to do that than to purify sewage. This is exactly what is happening in the helium market.
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It can be mixed with something else. Water isn't chemically degraded when it's mixed into sewage, either, but you don't go drinking it. You need to separate it first - or just drink other water that's already pure, since it's cheaper to do that than to purify sewage. This is exactly what is happening in the helium market.
Uhh...that's a pretty picture. A useful metaphor, but still...eww.
"Here you go kids! Sewage balloons! Have fun!"
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It means it is mixed with other stuff that's difficult enough to separate out that it's cheaper to buy new refined hydrogen than to refine the 'low grade helium'.
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And the reason it's cheaper is because of the artificial price depression caused by selling the US National Helium Reserve.
Once you let that helium leak into the atmosphere, it's gone.
Just like how oil shale is now considered profitable, despite it's much lower EROI compared to light sweet crude, extracting helium from low-grade gas mixtures would one day seem economically attractive. If we weren't chuffing [1] it away by handing it to kids in 2 litre containers.
[1] to "chuff" is a North UK slang for fartin
Thank god we have Ted Cruz (Score:2)
Thank god we have politicians in America willing to stand up for not doing their jobs.
Re:Thank god we have Ted Cruz (Score:5, Interesting)
Note from TFA that the disagreement that Senator Cruz had with the bill was that he and the House supported the version of the bill that said that the money from Helium sales should go to defecit reduction and the bill that passed that he voted against had the money going for national parks and "environmental issues."
Re:Thank god we have Ted Cruz (Score:5, Insightful)
So he voted against a bill that earmarked the funds in favor for a version that uses the funds for "deficit reduction" which is political speak for money into my pork project. Funding is fungible and no one knows how to use smoke and mirrors to hide budgeting irregularities like a congress person.
At least he didn't waste anyone's time by filibustering it and then voting for it immediately afterwards.
Re:Thank god we have Ted Cruz (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny. I feel that environmental issues is political speak for putting money into pork projects like Solyndra.
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Read the parent post again until you understand it.
Re:Thank god we have Ted Cruz (Score:4, Insightful)
National parks have a fixed budget. For FY14 they only requested $2.6 billion dollars (an increase of $ 56.6 million dollars from last year). Even with this budget they had to lower their employment levels by 242 FTE (basically a labor force reduction of approximately 242 people). The NPS manages 84.4 million acres of protected lands spread across every state in the US. They existed since 1916 and their total operating budget is barely a blip on the radar inside a $3.8 trillion dollar budget. Since 42 national parks have or will soon have natural gas wells, it seems only fair that the national park system have some financial benefit from having to monitor these projects (Helium is extracted from natural gas, especially from states like Wyoming where the Grand Tetons are located).
Pork projects tend to be a short-term investment for the benefit of a very small region. Like a new bridge in Alaska, Light Industrial Zone (with only a single customer) in a southern state, a project to document the history of minority colleges in the deep south, or 22 very expensive fighter jets that the DOD says they don't need.
"Deficit reduction" actually means if we get 16 billion dollars of income from helium, we have 16 billion dollars to spend on anything we like before we reach that imaginary debt ceiling.
You didn't notice they used the term "deficit reduction" instead of "debt reduction". If it was for debt reduction then all the money would go towards the principal of debt already owed. This is not the case.
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When is America going to wake up to what it has become and who is paying for it?
When the oil producers switch away from the USD, and the Bretton Woods illusion comes crashing down. That's why taking over Syria and Iran are so important and why Putin won a major victory.
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Note from TFA that the disagreement that Senator Cruz had with the bill was that he and the House supported the version of the bill that said that the money from Helium sales should go to defecit reduction and the bill that passed that he voted against had the money going for national parks and "environmental issues."
Wow. I am impressed that Senator Cruz has taken such a principled stand against doing anything to improve our national parks or to protect the environment. That asshole is nothing if not consistent.
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"Environmental issues" being the code word for pork. Specifically, most of the money from the sale of helium not going to the National Park Service is going to fund a continuation [opb.org] of the Secure Rural Schools Act [wikipedia.org]. The SRSA itself is essentially a hand-out program for dying, rural counties that ran into budget problems after logging and other natural resource extraction activities were significantly scaled back, which had left those counties with no other significant economic activity to tax for income (and t
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You would think there is a business opportunity here - given enough cash, you could buy out the government's stake in the helium reserve and become a monopoly supplier overnight...
Re:Thank god we have Ted Cruz (Score:5, Interesting)
Forgive my ignorance (Score:2)
How did the U.S. start stockpiling helium? I see no mention in the article of the actual process for collecting and storing it.
Re:Forgive my ignorance (Score:5, Informative)
The US has maintained the Strategic Helium Reserve for about ninety years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve [wikipedia.org]
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It is mostly a by product of production of natural gas [wikipedia.org], but it can also be generated by radioactive ore.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve [wikipedia.org]
The TL;DR answer to your question (Score:2)
The Strategic Helium Reserve began in the early 20th century as a gas supply for airships, and because the prime source of coolant for the space/missile programs of the Cold War. Most of our helium is collected during natural gas production.
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Some natural gas reseves contain helium and if the price is right (how high the price has to be depends on how much helium is in the gas) that helium can be extracted from the natural gas by liquifying the other gasses in the mixture.
Many years ago the USA decided helium was strategically important for airships (and later nukes) and stockpiled it in a depleted gas well. However in 1995 they decided it was no longer strategically important enough to stockpile and started selling off the reserves.
YAY! I'm going diving next month. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:YAY! I'm going diving next month. (Score:5, Funny)
We should sneak in at night and scoop it up. The sun will never know.
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Plus, Helium is a waste product of Hydrogen fusion. Getting it out of there should make the sun stay on the main sequence longer before converting to higher order fusion and becoming a Red Giant. Sounds like we could use all the Helium the sun's got, and save the solar system from the menace of bloated communist stellar conversion..
Apparently, helium is not yet so scarce ... (Score:3)
Apparently, helium is not yet so scarce that it's not available in balloons at the grocery store.
Depends where you look. Many outlets around the region of Montreal stopped selling helium balloons because of the scarcity. Some voluntarily due to local hospitals having difficulties keeping their MRIs runnings and some due to prices going up.
renewable resource (Score:2)
If helium can be produced from renewable natural gas, for example landfills, why not sell off the entire stockpile?
Re:renewable resource (Score:5, Informative)
Helium isn't produced from natural gas, it's found trapped underground in natural gas fields. So unless you can power a hydrogen fusion plant with renewable natural gas, we only have what we can find in the ground for the time being.
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Helium isn't produced from natural gas, it's found trapped underground in natural gas fields. So unless you can power a hydrogen fusion plant with renewable natural gas, we only have what we can find in the ground for the time being.
OTOH, the earth creates a great deal of new helium every year, as a byproduct of the decay of various radioactive elements in the crust and core. It's not an unlimited resource, but neither is it something we're easily going to deplete even though close to 100% of the helium we use for various purposes ends up being released into the atmosphere and floats off into space.
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Natural decay only produces so much helium so fast, much like petroleum and coal. It's definitely possible to use up what we've got and then not have enough for what's important.
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No, but we can deplete all the helium that is economical to extract. Then prices will go up. A lot.
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I am pretty sure that Helium is not produced from natural gas
Not 100% sure...?
Re:renewable resource (Score:5, Informative)
you are free associating and winding up at an incongruous thought
helium is associated only with old, deep natural gas deposits. it collects there because radioactive elements decay deep in the earth, releasing helium, and that helium has to go somewhere. if it doesn't percolate up and vent into the atmosphere, it collects with likewise entrapped methane gas deposits
meanwhile, natural gas from landfills would not have this helium, as it is a much more shallow and much more recent source of methane, it hasn't been around long enough to gather very slowly formed byproducts of radioactive decay
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Although abundant in the universe, helium on Earth comes from the radioactive decay of certain elements in bedrock, mainly uranium and thorium. The helium tends to migrate up to the surface and, eventually, wafts away into space. However, the helium can be trapped in certain geologic formations, such as salt domes, which also happen to be the kinds
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Pretty much all of the Earths helium slowly accumulated there via radioactive decay over millions or billions of years.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium [wikipedia.org]
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No, if you think extracting helium from natural gas is the same as extracting hydrogen and oxygen from water then I'm pretty much with the AC on this one.
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And no, natural gas is not a "chemical compound consisting of multiple elements". And yes, it seems very likely that you either failed chemistry or should have.
Natural gas is a gas mixture of various substances. Some are compounds, such as methane and propane, and some are not, such as elemental helium.
Helium is not scarce at all (Score:3)
Helium production is just lacking. There is more than enough helium - at reasonable concentrations - in many natural gas fields to cover all of the demand on the planet for literally thousands of years, at current rates.
There are also some helium extraction plants either under construction or in the process of coming on line right now. There's a new one, in Qatar, which will account for 25% of the world's production when it's fully on line. Russia is expanding their own production, and India is starting to build helium extraction into their natural gas production lines.
The only thing that kept the big natural gas producers in the US from adding helium extraction equipment to their production stream was the artificially-low price mandated by the Federal helium reserve. Some US companies already have their extraction equipment in use, and others are starting to build them. It's not hard - basically 1920s tech.
Re:Helium is not scarce at all (Score:4, Informative)
To be somewhat more precise, there isn't a mandated price, in the sense of formal price controls. But the federal helium reserve accumulated huge stockpiles, and has been slowly selling them off since 1996, which has kept the price low by flooding the market. On the one hand, that discourages private investment, but on the other hand, it's not clear it's entirely a bad thing: if we don't actually need this helium reserve lying around forever, selling it off slowly seems like a reasonable thing to do.
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C&EN article about it: (Score:3)
Here's a Chemical and Engineering News article from last month about it.
http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i37/Helium-Headache.html [acs.org]
The problem isn't the amount of helium in the earth. It's the dislocation caused by the government selling it at an artificially low price for some years, thus undercutting building new refining capacity. This current mess that we just mostly avoided would have been from suddenly shutting off the government supply and causing a price/availability problem.
Full Disclosure: This effects me directly. I work with Dean Olson, the guy quoted in the article. Unavailability of helium (the price wasn't so bad, but it just wasn't available. i.e. The supplier says it costs N dollars a liter of liquid helium, but you need X liters, and we have one fourth that amount available.) kept a new NMR system here offline for some months, thus delaying a bunch of research (And of course, that has a knock on effect of increased cost down the line. You have to keep paying the salaries of the researchers while they wait and do something else.)
Hopefully we can get back to our usual form of governmental funding neurosis soon rather than reaching a new and interesting level of insanity.
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FYI the helium reserve that the Fed maintains will only last another 3-5 years.
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Yes, suddenly.
That's from the view of the users. Having the reserve shut down on the 7th and not even be able to extract the helium owned by others creates a disruption to the end users. This has been developing for a long time as you say.
The part about could have and should have makes little difference to the physics when a magnet quenches.
There's plenty of time for assigning well deserved blame, but it doesn't change the temperature of the magnet "right now".
Methane (Score:2)
Or will hot air prevail on Capitol Hill? (Insert your methane joke here.)"
FTFY
The most non-renewable of all resources (Score:4, Interesting)
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You consider using helium for MRI machines a waste?
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I consider the number of machines we keep constantly running at super-cooled temperatures compared to the overall usage rate a waste.
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So you think the supply outweighs the demand, can you back that claim up? I was under the impression most hospitals were profitable and would not keep around an expensive machine if it weren't being used. However, I just did a quick search and cannot find any evidence either way.
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Comparison to any other first world nation?
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Profitable doesn't imply that it isn't consuming a resource. It just means that the price charged covers the current costs of that resource, and still yields profits to the machine owners. As the supply of He dwindles, its price will go up, and MRI machines will become increasingly expensive to operate. Those costs will be passed to the patients (and their insurance companies.) Eventually the procedures will become unaffordable, and some hospitals will shut them down as a result.
Meanwhile, engineers will co
Re:Dispensing our reserves? (Score:5, Informative)
This is one reason why the U.S. has per capita medical spending several times that of the rest of the developed world.
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Federal grants to buy machines such as MRI mean getting one can be dirt cheap for a rural or poverty zone hospital. However, by act of congress, these grants are for the equipment only, not for training or paying for operators or maintainers, which still has to be funded locally, and is an ongoing cost that can eventually eclipse all the original costs. Having the item offline for lack of trained personnel by definition means actual working supply may or may not exceed demand, but if you include the stuff t
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Don't ever make the mistake of linking medical profitability with ANY other metric in the US. It's completely divorced from reality and impossible to pin down.
Rather like the US Government budget. And people say we don't have socialized healthcare.
Re:Dispensing our reserves? (Score:5, Funny)
This is America. Competition among hospitals is a big part of what makes our healthcare system the envy of the developed world.
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I've heard people say this not as a joke before.
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This is America. ..our healthcare system the envy of the developed world.
I'm not envious, I live in the UK and our healthcare system works fine, thank you very much - and it's much cheaper per person.
The government is hard at work wrecking it at the moment but, the NHS being the biggest organisation in the country, a wrecking job like that takes time and it's still going strong.
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You consider using helium for MRI machines a waste?
Yes. There is little evidence that they lead to better health outcomes for patients, especially if you consider the alternatives. Heart disease is our number one killer, but the most effective remedy is not fancy technology that can build a 3D model of the arteries, but low dose aspirin at a cost of $4 per year. But there is no profit in that, so we get the fancy technology instead.
Re:Dispensing our reserves? (Score:4, Insightful)
The reality is as long as America wants a for-profit health-care system, and each hospital is an independent entity, you're never going to fix this.
There is no room in the US for efficiencies in the system, because the system is being ran as a bunch of separate businesses. Nobody is going to stop running their very profitable MRI machine to conserve helium or for any other reason unless there's a benefit to them.
In the parts of the world which have a single-payer public system, they mostly shake their heads over the US and their attitude to this.
Your system is set up so that whoever can pay the most can get treated first, and the rest are welcome to suffer and go without.
For a 'civilized' country, America is shockingly indifferent to the fate of the rest of the populace. Which means any time the US does something altruistic, you have to assume there's a financial angle you're not seeing.
America has elevated being a selfish bastard to a religion. Which is what this is about is one group loudly saying "we should be completely selfish bastards and fuck the rest of the country".
Which in some circles makes your Republicans essentially terrorists because they're goal is to more or less undermine society and let the rest burn. In their mind, as long as the rich stay rich and government is small, the rest of the consequences are irrelevant.
So as long as your politicians idealize profits at any expense, and not giving a shit about people, this is what you'll get. And, quite frankly, what you deserve.
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I'm not sure how I feel about this. Does every competing hospital in my region need to run its own MRI machine(and yes, that's the biggest use of helium) wasting dozens of kilograms of liquid helium a year? That won't lower the price of my procedure substantially, but it does throw away literal tons of the most irreplaceable resource on the planet.
When it counts, you can always count on congress to come together, and do the wrong thing.
If it's a closed system then none is wasted.
"Dozens of kilograms" is nothing, eg. look at how much The Mythbusters have wasted over the years....
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They aren't closed systems. That's the end of that.
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Seems pretty energetically expensive. Is He in Europe so expensive that compressing it down is economically feasible given your traditionally high energy costs? Or is compression not that difficult (from a power expenditure view)?
Re:republicans should just shut up and play nice.. (Score:4, Funny)
"I'm cranky and off-topic. Listen to me because of how much I hate those I disagree with"
Re:republicans should just shut up and play nice.. (Score:5, Funny)
"I'm cranky, off-topic, and immediately conclude people who aren't as dumb as me are a category of people I hate."
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Just the wee little engineering issues of working at temperatures and pressures where we don't understand the basic physics well.
No problem, we'll just use the tractor beam.