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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

The helium shortage seems to come up a lot lately. Not mining, I understand, but that's what came to mind.

From what I understand, the helium shortage is mostly due to current price. Price will go up, more plants will go up, and there is plenty in natural gas deposits. The feds have just been dumping at artificially low prices. Prices are already increasing, and NASCO just put up a new plant a few months ago.

The shortage of almost any commodity or product is due to price. The earth has abundant amounts of rare earth elements, hydrocarbons, gold, platinum, silver etc.

The iron laws of commodity trading are supply and demand curves.

A non existent supply curve basically never exists. There is almost always a price with which one can acquire a commodity or bring in supply. As you stated in the helium case, prices may need to rise for increased supply to come on absent new technology.

Side note: Whale oil is about the only “useful” commodity I can think of that was almost eliminated entirely. Whales were basically saved by the oil and coal industries as lamps moved from whale oil, to kero, and eventually incandescent light. Ironically these industries now threaten sea life through pollution and global warming, but they were initially a saviour of the whales.

> Whales were basically saved by the oil and coal industries as lamps moved from whale oil, to kero, and eventually incandescent light.

Also, AFAIR, synthetic lubricants.

From what I understand, whale oil is still one of the best choices in many machine applications (including cars) and wasn't really killed so much by synthetic lubricants as by the Endangered Species Act.

I heard the exact opposite - that no amount of environmentalist pressure helped, and the problem fixed itself as soon as synthetic lubricants became good and cheap enough. Unfortunately I don't have any source for that; I read it somewhere and remembered as an interesting tidbit.

You are correct. Endangered species protection didn’t mean shit at the time. Easy to access whales near shore were nearly wiped out, and whalers pursued deeper international waters for “supply”. For more information on this, I highly recommend the book, “1000 barrels a second” by Peter Tertzakian, the executive director of Arc Energy. The book is a bit dated (pre fracking revolution), but very good. By pure luck in timing, and the increasing cost of pursuing whales as they were thinned out, economic oil production saved the day for our whales.

Interestingly, the exact same story has played out in oil. Easy to access conventional fields in politically stable countries was first drained, then producers had to go further and deeper offshore, and into politically unstable countries for supply.

Once again a “magic bullet” of technological development saved the day. Fracking replenished stable supplies and pushed a supply shortage out significantly, buying us some time to transition to cleaner energy. It is important to not squander this time that we were once again lucky to come into at the right time or we could face a massive economic disruption as large fracking fields like the Permian are drained over the next 15-30 years.

We can only get lucky so many times.

I’ve worked in energy trading (oil, gas, power) my whole career. If anyone has any questions on commodities trading, risk, business development, or quantitative analysis in the commodities trading field, feel free to reach out.

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