[PrestonSturges]

My neighbor works at a major industrial gas company and he mentioned the helium shortage. He says they are only filling 75% of the ordered amount.

[Plantagenet]

Don't let Newtie know there is a Helium 3 shortage---theres plenty of He3 on the moon.

Newtie will start talking about his moon colony and mining the moon again.

[Kristen]

Mining helium-3 from the moon would take at least a hundred years to set up, if it could even work. The helium-3 we use is mostly from the decay of tritium, which is found in aging nuclear weapons.

[sparky]

.
One of the by product of the oil extraction is Helium
beside the balloons it's also a major industrial gas
can't make it and distillation from thin air is prodigiously expensive

Peak Helium is a significant butresse of the oil peak

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/77ae69d6 ... z2DgOHbFY4

[Tanada]

While it is true distilling it from air for the sake of getting out the Helium is crazy expensive that isn't how those few who do so go about it. The big cryo factories cool out the gasses they want, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Argon. The trace gasses left behind are usually just vented away but with a small additional cost they can be compressed into tanks. That would be IIRC mostly Neon with a little Krypton and Helium mixed in. I haven't dug deeply into the issue but Helium like Petroleum has been so cheap for so long nobody I know of is separating it out in sale able quantities. Once the huge Helium Reserve in the USA is sold off there will be an incentive for the big cryo plants to save the leftovers when they freeze the Ar, N and O out of the air for sale.

[sparky]

.
Yes , the cryofactories can use their distillation tails
also there are oil and gas fields with usable quantities
but again , it will be much more expensive

[EnergyUnlimited]

That would be IIRC mostly Neon with a little Krypton and Helium mixed in.

Nope.
Krypton is less volatile than oxygen, so it would stay in final fraction left after other components including oxygen are distilled off.
It would stay together with Xenon, N2O and CO2 and it is commercially recovered, very much like xenon is, from this final fraction.

Neon and helium stays (as you say) in most volatile fraction or in gas which have failed to liquefy.

I haven't dug deeply into the issue but Helium like Petroleum has been so cheap for so long nobody I know of is separating it out in sale able quantities. Once the huge Helium Reserve in the USA is sold off there will be an incentive for the big cryo plants to save the leftovers when they freeze the Ar, N and O out of the air for sale.

Certain NG contains ~few % of Helium (eg much of NG produced in Poland contain 1% of it).
This is an obvious alternative to He rich American NG.

[radon]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/NL08Ag01.html

...But the United States, which is currently producing most of the world's helium, is short of fresh supplies and low on stocks.

This is because the government-set price is rising too slowly to cover the combination of rising demand, delivery and distribution costs, and spot-price speculation.
...
The Americans believe not only that they dominate worldwide production, but also that they hold the largest reserves of helium in the global market.
...
"The Americans are wrong on the order of magnitude," Ogrel says. " In my latest report, I have determined that Russia holds 34% of world reserves; and the US 18%. Qatar holds 21% and Algeria 17%."
...
A study of the future for the Russian helium industry, issued earlier this year by Ernst & Young, concludes that US supplies are likely to dwindle, while helium production and liquefaction projects planned by Algeria and Qatar may generate an over-supply in the global market.
...

[Tanada]

The US Congress, in their INFINITE wisdom ordered the federal helium reserve to stop refilling itself and to sell off its helium store as demanded by the market.

I wonder if anyone up there ever thinks through any of the decisions they make or if they just vote however the lobbyists tell them to vote without a moments pause to reflect.

By 1995, a billion cubic metres of the gas had been collected and the reserve was US$1.4 billion in debt, prompting the Congress of the United States in 1996 to phase out the reserve.[1][2] The resulting "Helium Privatization Act of 1996" (Public Law 104–273) directed the United States Department of the Interior to start liquidating the reserve by 2005.[3]

By 2007, the federal government was reported as auctioning off the Amarillo Helium Plant. The National Helium Reserve itself was reported as "slowly being drawn down and sold to private industry."[4]

Also the US Government report http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9860&page=1

The price of helium will probably remain stable through at least 2010. The price established by the Helium Privatization Act for sales from the Federal Helium Reserve is approximately 25 percent above the current commercial price for crude helium. For this reason and because all helium refiners on the BLM pipeline have long-term take-or-pay contracts with producers of crude helium, it is highly unlikely that the refining industry will buy and use gas from the Federal Helium Reserve rather than from private stockpiles or cheaper commercial suppliers.

Once the private reserves are exhausted, however, refiners will have no realistic option other than to begin purchasing the crude available from the Federal Helium Reserve. (The only other source is more production, and production is driven by the demand for natural gas, not the demand for helium.) Nevertheless, under various plausible supply-demand scenarios, private industry will not need to purchase the entire Federal Helium Reserve to meet demand through 2020.

As the Hugoton-Panhandle gas fields are depleted and the Reserve is exploited, the price of crude helium will increase. However, because transportation and purification costs account for a large portion of the price of refined helium, an increase of 25 percent in the price of crude helium would probably increase the price of pure helium by only 8 to 10 percent.

[Keith_McClary]

The Increasing Scarcity of Helium

... in 1996 Congress passed the Helium Privatization Act. The Act ordered the Reserve to sell off its stockpile, starting in 2005, at a formula-driven price -- not auctioned off at market rate, and to cease sales and shut down operations by 2015.

This flooded the market and dramatically drove the price of helium down. And, conservationists argued, dramatically drove consumption up. "As a result of that Act, helium is far too cheap and is not treated as a precious resource," Nobel laureate Robert Richardson said in 2010. "It's being squandered.[...] They couldn't sell it fast enough and the world price for helium gas is ridiculously cheap." From an article in The Independent:

Professor Richardson believes the price for helium should rise by between 20- and 50-fold to make recycling more worthwhile. Nasa, for instance, makes no attempt to recycle the helium used to clean is rocket fuel tanks, one of the single biggest uses of the gas.

Professor Richardson also believes that party balloons filled with helium are too cheap, and they should really cost about $100 (£75) to reflect the precious nature of the gas they contain

At the current consumption rates, Richardson estimated we would deplete the world’s helium reserves within 100 years.

Also, instead of encouraging private sector participation in helium production, the selling-off of the National Helium Reserve did the exact opposite. Helium became so cheap nobody saw any need, nor profit, in extracting it themselves. As 2015 neared, scientists sounded the alarm that if the National Helium Reserve shut down according to plan, there would be nothing to replace it. The United States is still the world leader in helium production, producing about 70% of the helium in the world, meaning a US shortage could cause worldwide problems.

2013 saw the passage of the Helium Stewardship Act, which allowed the National Helium Reserve to continue operations until 2021, and to sell its helium at auction -- creating prices closer to market rate. But not before selling off a large chunk of the Reserve for peanuts.

[Subjectivist]

Experts have been warning of a looming shortage of helium for years, as the known reserves are being depleted. Now British researchers have discovered a large reserve of helium gas in Tanzania, using a new exploration method that offers hope for the future.

It turns out that volcanic activity plays a critical role in creating new helium reserves, according to Diveena Danabalan, a graduate student at Durham University who presented the team’s findings at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Japan. Scientists from Durham and Oxford University collaborated with Norwegian exploration company Helium One to combine this insight with seismic imaging and geochemical sampling to identify the newly discovered reserve.

We very much need to locate new helium reserves. It’s not just used in children’s party balloons. Fully one-fifth of the helium consumed is used in MRIs, since the machines require superconducting magnets, which in turn need liquid helium to reach sufficiently cold temperatures to be superconducting. It’s used by the semiconductor industry to grow crystals and to cool components, and to detect leaks in test containers. And helium is essential to basic scientific research, particularly in materials science, where cooling a substance down to ultra-cold temperatures freezes out lots of complicating factors, making the system much more simple to study.

http://gizmodo.com/discovery-of-huge-st ... 1782684367

[GHung]

Helium discovery a 'game-changer'

Scientists have discovered a large helium gas field in Tanzania.

With world supplies running out, the find is a "game-changer", say geologists at Durham and Oxford universities.

Helium is used in hospitals in MRI scanners as well as in spacecraft, telescopes and radiation monitors.

Until now, the precious gas has been discovered only in small quantities during oil and gas drilling.

Using a new exploration approach, researchers found large quantities of helium within the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley.

They say resources in just one part of the Rift valley are enough to fill more than a million medical MRI scanners.

Prof Chris Ballentine, of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, said: "This is a game-changer for the future security of society's helium needs and similar finds in the future may not be far away."

And colleague Dr Pete Barry added: 'We can apply this same strategy to other parts of the world with a similar geological history to find new helium resources. "......



....Helium is formed by the slow and steady radioactive decay of terrestrial rock. However, global supplies are running low, with warnings that supplies cannot be guaranteed in the long term.

Prof Jon Gluyas, of the Department of Earth Sciences at Durham University, who collaborated on the project, said the price of helium had gone up 500% in the last 15 years.

"Helium is the second most abundant element in the Universe but it's exceedingly rare on Earth," Prof Gluyas told BBC News.

"Moreover, any helium that you do find if you're not careful, will escape, just like a party balloon it rises and rises in the atmosphere and eventually escapes the Earth's gravity altogether.....

More: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36651048