Remember Peak Helium? Without Supplies Of Key Gas, No MRIs, No Brain Scans

[hatrack]

Oops. Another one of those interesting problems you never heard of that are really almost as important as the tears in Hillary's eyes in a New Hampshire diner . . .

Some of the great things that make human live much easier are dependent on rare non-renewable resources. Helium is one of these, a noble gas with remarkable qualities due to its inert state. It is used for example to cool metals needed to create superconductivity. This process is applied in the medical industry to make Multi-Resonating-Image( MRI) scans, a technique to produce images of body tissue, making accurate diagnosis of health problems without surgery possible. But Helium is also applied in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopty (NMR), for the arc welding of various metals amongst which are titanium, magnesium and aluminium, to reduce high-pressure risk in deep-sea breathing systems, to purge and pressurize liquid-hydrogen rocket propulsion systems, to find leaks in pipelines, as a coolant in certain nuclear reactor types, possibly for superfluid gyroscopes and last and for me definetly the least, to let balloons float.

Can Helium be substituted? The answer is no for applications which need cooling below a temperature of minus 210 degrees centigrade since that is the temperature at which the next best thing, liquid nitrogen, freezes. Helium on the other hand only liquifies at minus 260 degrees centigrade and stays in that state even down to absolute zero. Making it the most precious element for cooling at very low temperatures. For MRI scanning this means the available substitutes can only offer much higher temperatures at which the scanner can operate, implying less conductivity and therefore a less effective scanner.

The availability of Helium is thus quite important. So how long will this resource last?

Introduction

Helium is a gas that over time came into existence mainly from the radiogenic decay of uranium and thorium in the earth’s mantle. As it migrated to the surface it has remained trapped in underground fields combined with other gasses and in the earth’s atmosphere. The forming rate is too slow to be of any relevance in the timescale of a few human generations. Interestingly, very few studies are being done on the limitations of this resource. Only one research group in the entire world is currently studying the topic. The number of people who know a great deal about the future supply can be counted on one or maybe two hands. One of these is Phil Kornbluth, executive vice president of Matheson Tri-Gas Global Helium. For some background information on Helium I suggest listening to this interview with Kornbluth.
Types of Helium reserves

The sources of Helium on earth can be broadly divided into three categories; 1) Helium rich resources from natural gas fields with a helium concentration of 0.3% or higher; 2) Helium lean resources from natural gas fields with a concentration below 0.3% which mostly is uneconomical to extract; 3) Atmospheric Helium which will likely never be produced because it is too energy intensive to do so. For the two sources of Helium from natural gas, there is little known about the energy costs of production since Helium has so far been produced as a by-product of natural gas production. In this case only produced when the lifetime of the natural gas field and the gas resources warrant the construction of infrastructure to produce Helium for 20 years or longer.

EDIT

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3484

[NNadir]

1. Strictly put, helium does not remain in the atmosphere for very long.

Most of it boils off into space since, with its very low atomic weight, a significant portion (according to the Maxwell Boltzmann distribution) has velocities exceeding the escape velocity of earth.

There is a pretty decent explanation of the phenomenon here: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/energy/Companion/E07.4.pdf.xpdf

Helium is the second most common element on earth, but it is a trivial impurity on earth.

It is conceivable that small amounts of the gas might be made in the future from fast decaying actinides like Curium-242. However I recently calculated how much helium a ton of curium-242 would make in a year and, IIRC, it would be enough to fill a balloon with a radius of a few meters.

I don't believe that a ton of curium-242 has ever been made.

I'm sure that some genius will now pipe in with some nonsense about mining the clouds of Jupiter or some other science fiction crap.

[caraher]

2. Typo: He is the 2nd most abundant element in the universe, not on Earth

as the end of the sentence correctly indicates, there's not much in the atmosphere. Most of the easily-extracted gas is in natural gas deposits, and the fossil fuel industry usually doesn't find recovering it profitable. That should change as the shortage develops, and prices are already up significantly. The question is, will this happen before the oil companies vent it all into the atmosphere?

I suppose one could build MRI scanners with non-superconducting magnets, but as the OP points out they're far from ideal. Or alternatively, one might develop high-temperature superconductors that can be cooled with liquid nitrogen for use in high field magnets. But that requires a technology breakthrough physicists have been working on for 20 years.

[NNadir]

3. One can reach superconducting temperatures by pumping on hydrogen, but ...

...well perish the thought.

I suspect that helium for these purposes will be recycled significantly.

Thanks for the typo correction by the way.

[phantom power]

4. how about the superconductors at liquid-N2 temps?

[caraher]

5. The trouble is that more than just temperature is involved

In particular, these materials lose their superconducting properties in large magnetic fields. The implications for trying to use them in magnets are obvious!

There's also the challenge of making them into wire. They tend to be rather brittle, and fabricating a coil is an enormous challenge.

[phantom power]

7. Oh. I was sort of hoping they'd fixed that.

Well, off to the supermarket! My kid is looking forward to a free disposable helium balloon.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. My favorite way to make helium

[phantom power]

8. you mean favorite way to make *animated* helium?

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. Well... yeah...

Here's hoping for good news in the Spring!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=130094&mesg_id=130094

[caraher]

10. Speaking of fusion...

Apparently the
Bush budget has no room for our contribution to ITER

[hogwyld]

11. One other very important use for Helium

Is in the semiconductor industry. We use it a lot in the deposition of chemicals onto the bare silicon wafer that is used in almost every modern convenience out there. It's thermal properties cannot be duplicated, and interestingly enough, it's costs have skyrocketed over the past decade. Say good by to all of the cheap consumer electronics once this gas is gone.