My Helium 101

You may have heard there's a global shortage of helium, but this recent story from the New York Times story is full of other facts I never knew about the second lightest element. 

I had heard about the shortage and the fact that it was getting to be hard to find helium-inflated balloons, which make up 10% of the gas's use currently. I've thought, myself, that they should be taken off the market somehow, since they're often made of Mylar, which is not recyclable because it's made of multiple materials, and even when they're made from just one material, they generally end up in landfills or floating off into the oceans or wherever. Kind of a symbol of our waste-strewn modern world.

So a shortage of helium, in that sense, might not be such a bad thing if it drove all the cheap balloon marketers out of business, I thought.

What I learned from the Times story was eye-opening:

• The U.S. and Qatar are currently the biggest producers of helium, and that's because the gas is a byproduct of natural gas drilling. I had no idea about that. So essentially, it's a fossil fuel, at least in terms of production. 
• Russia is about to become a key player in the market as it brings huge natural gas reserves online along the Arctic coast in 2021, shipped out of Vladivostok, which has good proximity to both China and the U.S. West Coast. By the mid-2020s, Russia is expected to control up to 30% of the market, even though other countries are also increasing production.
• All of that seems bad, since it's part of natural gas production and natural gas should be projected to phase out, not ramp up, in a world facing a climate crisis caused by greenhouse gases.
  
• Helium in its liquid form, which is the coldest thing on the planet, is essential to MRI machines, where it cools the superconducting magnets. 
• It's also used in rockets and welding because it's completely not flammable. And it's also used in printing computer chips. So the fact that it's extracted at the same time as natural gas, but is essential in things like MRIs, is... not good.
• The history of helium in the U.S. sounds like it requires its own deep dive. The Times story, as it ran in the Star Tribune, ended with two paragraphs that give a brief glimpse of that depth:

The U.S. government began stockpiling the gas in the 1920s, when zeppelins seemed to have a future in military air power, a role that never came. Still, the Federal Helium Reserve holds in the porous rock of an abandoned gas field outside Amarillo, Texas, about 2.8 billion cubic feet of helium owned by the American people — enough for an armada of blimps, or about three billion balloons if Congress decided to throw a big party instead.

The 1996 Helium Privatization Act required the Bureau of Land Management, which runs the site, to sell the entire reserve to privatize the helium market. Periodic auctions became a major source of helium for industry and created a benchmark for global prices, affecting the cost of everything from balloons to M.R.I. scans. Private American companies will still produce helium. But the government reserve is expected to hold its last auction in 2023.

Zeppelins (which I assume are helium-filled) feature prominently in the sustainable transportation visions of Kim Stanley Robinson and others, so realizing that the gas is tied to fossil-fuel extraction is basically a big bummer. And learning that we, the people, used to own enough for "an armada of blimps" but Congress decided to privatize it during the Clinton era... well that's an extra insult. 

That we've created a huge market for unnecessary goods (party balloons) using something that's needed to run important machines (MRIs, and maybe transportation some day) is pretty typical of how we do things.

I don't know what other ways could be used to extract helium than this existing fossil fuel-based method. It's the second most abundant element, though, so it doesn't seem impossible that there is one. But right now, of course, the cheapest way is the fossil fuel way, since its externalities are not included in the cost. I wonder if, like concrete production, it's being worked on by multiple scientists and engineers and I don't even know it. I hope so.