The Large Hadron Collider, a welder’s workshop, a nuclear reactor, an MRI, and a birthday party all share a common element. Literally: All of them need helium. Liquid or gaseous, room temperature or near absolute zero, the world uses up about 8 billion cubic feet of this noblest of gases every year. And you may have heard that we’re running out.
Which is why the discovery of a huge pocket of helium in Tanzania, revealed yesterday at a conference in Japan, has received so much press. Researchers from the University of Oxford found helium released from rocks by underlying volcanic heat, and they found a lot of it. There’s at least 54 billion cubic feet of the stuff (enough to make everyone on Earth sound squeaky for about 20 minutes) and likely much more. That’s just under seven times the annual global demand. But it’s a reach to say that these researchers have resolved the global helium shortage---because there isn’t one.
Earth does have a finite supply of helium. Gravity can’t hold onto the tiny element once it’s moving quickly in the upper atmosphere, so it escapes into space. And because it’s small enough to slip through holes in rocks, helium would escape from Earth whether or not humans were sucking it up. Which they are---though it’s not as easy as sticking a straw in the ground. While some helium is made naturally through radioactive decay, it’s not a huge amount and it’s generally spread out over the crust. So scientists have to look for natural pockets that are a millions or billions of years old.
If quickly using up supplies of a resource millions of years in the making sounds like a job for the fossil fuel industry, you’re not wrong. Most of the world’s helium comes from natural gas, where it can exist in very small quantities. A good source will be about 3 percent helium, but more often helium hovers between 0.1 percent and 0.5 percent---nothing compared to the relatively astronomical 10 percent pocket found in Tanzania. But worldwide, helium is about a thousand times less lucrative than gas, so even though removing (inert) helium makes the gas burn better, companies don’t usually bother to take it out. “Normally, it’s an afterthought,” says Samuel Burton, assistant field manager at the Federal Helium Program. “It’s something that they don’t even consider because the natural gas makes so much more money for them.”
When helium’s price goes up---like it has for most of the past few years---natural gas companies are incentivized to sell extracted helium on its own. Countries like Qatar mine so much natural gas that even though it has relatively little helium, they can crank out a decent percentage of the world’s demand as an afterthought.
Most of the remainder currently comes from the Federal Helium Program’s underground tanks in Amarillo, Texas---though that’s changing. The US government started stockpiling helium back in the 1920s (when blimps were a viable wartime strategy) but they really got serious about it in the 1960s. “From ’62 to about ’75, they purchased about 34 billion cubic feet of crude helium,” Burton says. They’ve sold most of that off over the last 20 years or so, with the aim of closing their doors in 2021. Inconsistent and last-minute legislation about the rate of the selloff has helped to drive helium prices up over that time.
Increased prices usually mean lower supply, but that’s not true for this gas. “There is actually so much helium that’s flooding the market that it’s not in short supply at all,” Burton says. And as for the future, “I’ve seen a lot of talk about this global shortage of helium---that’s actually not the case. In the United States, we’ve got at least 20 years of known supplies that are easily, readily available.” There’s far more worldwide---including now this new rich deposit found in Tanzania. In 2014, the US Department of Interior estimated that there are 1,169 billion cubic feet of helium reserves left on Earth. That's enough for about 117 more years.
Helium isn’t infinite, of course, and it remains worth conserving. Many research labs, for instance, have developed ways of catching and recycling helium instead of letting it escape through cracks in (or just the outlet of) their experiments. But next time you see someone with helium balloons, don’t berate them. Enjoy the party instead.
