LOOK at you, filling your house with party balloons for New Year, sucking on the gas and laughing like Mickey Mouse. Acting like there’s an endless supply of helium on tap somewhere, so it’s fine to squander it on silly games. Well, it might be the second most abundant element in the Universe, but let me tell you, down here on Earth, we are about to run out.
No, really. Helium is a non-renewable resource, like diamonds or oil, and in less than 50 years our helium mines will run dry. The price of the precious gas is inflating rapidly and those in the know are fretting about what to do when no one can afford it any more.
Because there is far more than just party balloons at stake. Helium is the only thing that stays liquid at a temperature low enough to cool superconducting magnets, like the ones in MRI scanners at the hospital. It’s added to scuba tanks so that divers don’t get the bends. It replaces air in the equipment that makes fibre-optic cables, so the delicate strands don’t end up with bubbles locked inside.
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Helium atoms are so small scientists rely on the gas to tell them if a sensitive piece of lab equipment is leak-proof. It creates spark-free environments for those tricky welding jobs. It’s the basis of all cryogenics research. It fills the blimps that carry advertisements and hefts spy equipment aloft to watch for low-flying cruise missiles or drug smugglers in the Brazilian rainforest. And NASA uses masses of it to pressurise rocket engines. A world without helium is no laughing matter.
So where does this wonder gas comes from? Helium makes up 23 per cent of the mass of the visible Universe. Most of it forms when pairs of hydrogen atoms fuse together in the heart of a star. Down here on Earth, it is produced by the slow decay of naturally radioactive rock deep underground. It bubbles up through cracks in the Earth, mixes into the air, and eventually leaks from the top of the atmosphere into outer space.
All told we have an estimated 470 trillion cubic metres of helium. The bad news is that most of it is in the atmosphere, at the tiny concentration of 5 parts per million – which is way too sparse to be separated out. You need a concentration of about 3000 parts per million to make extraction affordable. Which at the moment means the best source is natural gas.
Not many of the world’s natural gas reservoirs are rich enough in helium to hit that magic number. Almost all that do are within a 400-kilometre radius of Amarillo, Texas, otherwise known as the “Helium Capital of the World”. Concentrations there can top a stunning 80,000 ppm – so high the gas won’t burn unless you remove the non-flammable helium. All in all, the US has 20 private plants that produce 150 million cubic metres of helium a year. The second biggest producer is Algeria, with 14 million cubic metres per year. Add a couple of smaller plants in Poland and Russia and that’s about it for the global supply. A couple of new plants are due to start up in the next few years, which could up annual production by almost a quarter. But, as we’ve been told so many times before, natural gas will run out eventually – current estimates say by 2060 at the latest.
When it comes to helium, we could be in trouble far sooner. At the moment we use just about as much of the gas as we collect every year, give or take a few per cent. But in the past five years the birth of the fibre-optic industry and the widespread use of MRIs has seen demand begin to outstrip supply.
We do have one helium cushion to fall back on. After the First World War, the USgovernment believed helium-filled airships would be the perfect weapon, so it started stockpiling the gas. The legacy of that programme is an underground cavern in Texas holding a billion cubic metres of it, and the government plans to sell it off to claw back some of the debt the project racked up.
The US National Research Council got a group of physicists together back in 2000 to work out the numbers. If demand goes up by, say, 5 per cent a year, they estimate all our stocks will be gone by 2012 and there will be a massive helium shortage. No more party balloons. If by some miracle demand stays the same as it was in 1998, we’ll still be out by about 2035. Any way you cut it, sooner or later we will be grasping at thin air.
So some day soon we will have to conjure up a new supply. Geologists have already found helium “hot spots” in vents along fault zones, topping out at 350 ppm in places like Matsushiro, Japan. Maybe future generations will learn about the great “helium rush” of 2020, with prospectors scouring tectonically active hills for helium-rich leaks. Alternatively, we could get it out of radioactive sand called monazite, the way they did back in the early 1900s before they twigged to the treasure trove in natural gas. Or we could somehow pick it molecule by molecule out of the air.
At the very least we could do better at recycling the stuff. In fact, we do a little of this already. Pure helium is reserved for scientific or medical applications. Anything left over afterwards is collected in giant bags and sent off to the balloon industry. Some day in the future, all environmentally friendly balloons might carry the stamp “100 per cent recycled helium”.
But will you be able to afford them? “The price has gone up about 40 per cent in the past three or four years,” says Pete Flaxman, cryogenics manager in the physics department at the University of Cambridge. And according to Nick Ward of gas-supply company BOC, which handles 30 per cent of the world’s helium purification and distribution, by 2005 the cost of crude helium will have doubled compared with this year’s prices. And the alternatives don’t look like they will come to the rescue just yet. “We could be talking something like a factor of 100 increase in price to get it out of the air,” says Ward.
“Distributors are starting to get worried,” says Marty Fish of the International Balloon Association in Kansas. Being close to the Texan source, gas is available there at rock-bottom prices. Even so, the cost – like their balloons – is going up and up and up. If nothing is done, says Fish, “people might think twice about having party balloons”.
Helium then and now
• Helium was discovered in 1868 when scientists found an inexplicable line in the spectrum of the Sun. They named it after the Greek word for sun, Helios.
• Today, the most expensive helium sells in Britain for about £50 per cubic metre. That makes helium worth more than its weight in gold.
• Helium makes your voice go squeaky because the sound travels faster in a low-density gas than it does in air. If instead of helium you breathed a lungful of xenon (a much heavier noble gas) your voice would get deeper. But don’t take silly risks if you try breathing either of these gases. Inert they may be, but while you are breathing helium you are not inhaling any oxygen – and you could end up suffocating.
• One party balloon can lift about 14 grams, so you would need 4600 of them to lift an average person. n Enough helium is sold in Britain every day to lift six elephants.