US designates helium as a critical material
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> Ripple effects from the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue to widen. There's yet another brewing shortage, this time in helium. While most people associate helium with balloons and funny voices, the element is used in a surprisingly wide variety of industrial settings, including semiconductor production, where its role in advanced lithography has been growing rapidly. But helium mining and exploration in North America has been practically non-existent for a variety of reasons. And while the US used to have a strategic helium reserve, the government started selling that down in the late 1990s. On this episode, we speak with Nicholas Snyder, the founder and CEO of North American Helium, which does helium mining in Canada. We discuss the properties of helium that make it so useful, as well as the difficulties of expanding global production and distribution.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjc6MgUY0BE
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/now-theres-a-helium-shortage-...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/now-theres-a-helium-sh...
The US had a strategic reserve, but it was sold off:
> Both chambers had Republican majorities for the first time since the 83rd Congress in 1953.
We had an unprecedented run of prosperity and American dominance in so many sectors.
2013 - Introduced by Republicans. Passed with 2 nay votes in the Senate, 1 in the House. [1]
Both parties allowed it to happen. In both cases it was veto-proof. Pointless to call out a president. Pointless to blame one party or the other. Both have overwhelming support for this.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_19...
1: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527/...
If Trump made a gigantic fuss about something that seems inconsequential, there would be more than 2 nay votes.
The Epstein files are the counter example of this.
The position in the United States to make sure people vote aligned is called Whip.
Given the makeup of Congress, and even myself as a chem engineer, I could see this as something easy to pass.
Sometimes I think we need more involvement from the deep state and less from people with nice looking hair.
It sounded odd to me that Clinton/Obama would champion this... It felt very free-market / Republican thing to do, especially with it being called the "Privatization Act"... So I looked for more info.
Sure enough, it was introduced by Republicans... But Democrats share full blame on this if you think it's wrong... and the measure passed by so much it's almost pointless to call out the president because -- as you noted -- if the president fought it, there probably wouldn't be unanimous consent followed by 98% approval on amendment. So again: Why call out the presidents and not the party numbers except to inflame?
I am not meaning / attempting to attack you. I was curious about why two Democrat presidents were being called out on something that seemed like a republican-themed billk. Upon investigation, I saw they signed it -- yes, as you said -- but also even if they didn't sign it, or vetoed it, it would still have passed with 98 to 100% on congressional approval.
I felt this was an important fact, in our highly political time, to point out this was one of those bipartisan bills that made it through.
I could additionally add that the house and senate were Republican controlled during the initial act, so the fact it got to Clinton during split-branch control is additionally proof of the bipartisan nature... But I was attempting to be beef and fa tual, and the given information I felt was sufficient to convey this was bipartisan.
I would have preferred more facts with your initial comment. It would have saved me some research time... Since I did the extra work, I decided to share it to save someone else that effort.
No, it doesn't. "Passed by Clinton" and "Passed by Obama" are the statements that oversimplify politics.
> The position in the United States to make sure people vote aligned is called Whip.
That is also a gross oversimplification of our politics.
Be wary of these.
I understand this to mean, which administration was ruling at the time, rather than that the president would be personally responsible.
Yes, you can read more about that here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50249073
Very sloppy
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-helium.pdf
If it is so important, why aren't all our gas wells extracting that helium? It is hard for me to see this as a ploy for anything other than raising helium prices for the few companies that do extract helium.
In anything that helium is critical for, the helium cost is inconsequential compared to both the cost of the other equipment that uses it, and the value gained from using that equipment.
Because until six months ago there was a cheap and convenient supply coming out of Persian Gulf states, and so its importance was not noticed (like so many other items that 'suddenly' became apparent when the supply was suddenly cut off).
The general population typically are doves because they can't see the consequences 10-50 years out.
My PhD bud, a Bernie supporter, thinks we should have put boots on the ground by now. I generally agree.
I lived through North Korea getting nuclear weapons in my lifetime. Before they were the end of a joke, today we have to care about the opinions of that backwater. (And I read international relations structural realists as much as I drink coffee... The job of the hegemon is to maintain the status quo.)
Diplomacy was a proven path to prevent Iran from reaching for nuclear deterrence. The plan worked well for America and Iran, which is probably what motivated Likud to escalate the situation and force them both to pick sides.
>The controversial gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 (NS2) has become the symbol of Germany’s widely criticised energy and security policy, which sought to build political bridges through trade and at the same time supply companies with cheap fuels. However, it drove the country into a fatal dependence on Russian oil and gas. Years later, government documents from the 2010s and early 2020s reported by Süddeutsche Zeitung showed that former chancellor Angela Merkel sought to portray her government as neutral and lacking competence in regards to the "business project" Nord Stream 2 to the outside world and European partners, while supporting increased gas trade with Russia through several actions.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/gas-pipeline-nord...
The level of enrichment they've been doing is higher than they need for power generation but it also isn't nearly enough to make nukes. A more reasonable explanation (given the assessments they aren't working on nukes) is that they were being deliberately provocative.
> So far as we know they never actually built one but they absolutely could and this was done under the previous leader
Right, they could, and didn't. Why? It was only 7 years from the discovery of fission to a proof of concept in the form of the trinity test. Either you assume a level of incompetence entirely divorced from Iran's efficacy on the international stage, or you accept they weren't trying.
Fatwa was put in place in 2003, Fordow construction was started 2006.
In the words of Obama in 2009: “The size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program,” then US President Barack Obama said in 2009
So who do I believe; a Supreme Leader who says they will not build nuclear weapons or my lying eyes...
Or perhaps you are saying that the Supreme Leader didn't have control over his country and some rebel faction was able to build that with out his knowledge?
Unless you have irrefutable proof that Iran has built a nuclear weapon, then you're admitting that diplomatic deescalation worked as a nonproliferation strategy.
Enrichment % is very misleading. Natural is about 0.7%. 3.5% is halfway to 90%. The distance from 60% to 90% is tiny.
That's because the distance is calculated using the quantity of raw material that needs to be filtered and not the enrichment percent, the more pure, the less material needed, hence smaller distance to 90%.
>Right, they could, and didn't. Why?
Some people worked hard to ensure the latter would be very inadvisable for Iran. Being so close isn't a stable equilibrium though.
Every enrichment process drops in efficiency as the enrichment increases, asymptotically approaching that process's enrichment ceiling.
That's why nobody uses thermal diffusion to enrich uranium: It's by far the easiest method (you can do it with 1800's technology), but the practical maximum enrichment fraction is too low for anything useful (other than providing feedstock to better enrichment processes).
That's also the reason a centrifuge enrichment plant uses warehouses full of cascaded centrifuges: The centripetal force inside the centrifuge is working against a diffusion gradient, so each stage only gives a small percentage decrease of the "derichment" fraction.
Once you pass 50%, you stop looking for U-235 needles in a haystack to keep and start looking for U-238 needles in a haystack to throw away.
>A U.S. intelligence assessment says Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons at the moment but has ramped up activities that could help it develop them. https://apnews.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-intelligence-b506...
So they were not actively building a nuke, only getting all the pieces together to build one ready....
Prior to the deal: >Iran initially possessed centrifuges sufficient for one nuclear weapon, but not for nuclear power. https://web.archive.org/web/20190709050018/https://www.polit...
After the deal was broken by Trump and Biden was trying to restart it.... >2023 : An IAEA report on the Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant found that two cascades of IR-6 centrifuges were configured in a way "substantially different" from what Iran had previously declared. Iran claimed the difference was due to a human error.
>On 4 March(2023), Grossi met with Raisi and other top Iranian officials. Earlier, IAEA had detected uranium particles enriched up to 83.7% at Fordow. In the meantime, Iran gave assurances that it would reinstall monitoring equipment at sensitive locations.
...which is why we (used to) have the JCPOA. Attacking Iran will have no effect if they can mine uranium domestically and build centrifuges themselves.
After the JCPOA the stockpile went to zero (esp. >5% enrichment):
* https://www.statista.com/chart/23528/irans-stockpile-of--low...
* https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/status-irans-nuclear-...
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/11/18/the-de...
One year after the US left JCPOA (during Trump 1.0) the stockpile started going up again.
Perhaps that's an acceptable cost of avoiding higher gas prices right now - except Iran would have had the capacity to decide these at will. It's a fair choice, but best to be aware of the consequences.
Why would Iran want to do it? Iran could absolutely control Hormuz* and get a nuke at will** under the deal. At that point it can avoid sanctions by threatening the Gulf. Or demand other concessions for allowing the Gulf to operate. That's what it tries to do now, but from a much weaker position compared to the deal timeline.
* Take the real life prewar Iranian missile and drone strength, assume Iran had an extra couple of hundreds of billions to pour into it, no import limits by the UN, a less restive populace, etc.
** Breakout timeline being a week at most at end of expiry timeline. Probably the only way to keep the Gulf independent at that scenario would have been nuclear deterrence.
>If not, why would they even bother to follow the agreement in the first place?
Because Iran wasn't anywhere strong enough at the time to risk a war, but the existence of the agreement and general developments would have predictably changed the power balance in its favor.
>The legality of what they do has never been a consideration
Well, if you decide something is legal, it's much tougher to change one's mind and stop it later.
Nukes, (or thousands of artillery pointed at densely populated areas allied with a country with nukes) are the surest way maintain sovereignty in the mad world we live in.
The plan in Iran was always self sufficiency.
One of the striking features of the last decade or so of global politics is the willingness of middle powers to arm and fuel regional conflicts, so I think it entirely plausible that a world where middle powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran gain nuclear weapons is one where, say, the Sudanese Civil War involves nukes.
I suspect that this belief has the same level of thought put into it as the "general populace". The crux of the issue is not Iran's nuclear proliferation, it's the hegemon's unreliability.
The US had the JCPOA, had allies for deterrence, and unilaterally decided to discard them in the name of inflation. One might argue that the electorate has decided that the US should no longer be a hegemon, and yet the administration still impose it's will on others.
There was a time when I believed that Iran was not a rational actor. That is not the case now. I can only hope that there are enough checks and balances to prevent other actors from acting too irrationally.
I've heard the same thing about petroleum. :)
Funnily enough that seems to be the same idea for petroleum. :)
We risk running out of cheap helium. But if you are willing to pay infinite money there is near-infinite helium
Maybe with a couple hundred more years of technological development...
Our moon itself is said to have ~1M tons of very valuable Helium-3 in surface deposits, but even that's nigh impossible to harvest commercially right now.
> The current helium shortage is the fourth to occur since 2006 and is being caused by shutdowns at several major helium producers. The shortage has been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, as Russia is one of the world’s top suppliers of helium.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/6/24/helium-shortage...
I have a friend who teaches chemistry at a well known university that can no long run some labs because the equipment to run them needs, you guessed it, helium. This has been a long running problem that the Iran war has exacerbated, but is by no means the cause.
If it was worth (i.e., profitable) the effort to create to new supply wouldn't someone have done it by now? If no one is willing to pay for the effort, why should anyone do it at a loss?
(Isn't this, in theory, what The Market™ is all about? If people really wanted something they'd be willing to pay more for it, and it would be an incentive for more supply.)
† I've seen articles from 2019 discussing the (alleged?) shortage.
I hear what you’re saying, but it’s the same reason a lot of natural gas is flared off or vented at oil wells. Helium is less than 1% of the total feed gas coming off a well and it requires specialized equipment to be able to recover it, on top of a way to distribute it. In most cases depending on the mix of gases coming out, it’s simply not economical for the operator.
Even with the supply being under pressure and prices going up from Qatar’s supply being cut off, that still might not be enough for companies to build the infrastructure. It would be a huge gamble. Once traffic in the straight of Hormuz goes back to normal that could be a losing proposition.
Because the free market considers any supplier but the cheapest to be inefficient and drives them out of business. Robustness of the supply chain is always less profitable.
Whether helium or eggs or toilet paper, we keep getting shown the results of this lesson over and over. And people refuse to learn.
Decades of work to hand over a critical resource to private hands.
We should have mandatory recycling for all uses. Every use of helium should have to build recollection into their workflows.
> On Thursday, the U.S. government sold the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground stockpile based in Amarillo, Texas, that supplies up to 30% of the country’s helium.
> Once the deal is finalized, the buyer — which will likely be the highest bidder, the industrial gas company Messer — will claim some 425 miles of pipelines spanning Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, plus about 1 billion cubic feet of the only element on Earth cold enough to make an MRI machine work.
> ...
> The sale has been in the works for more than a decade. Congress first mandated it through the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. It was initially supposed to occur in 2021, but a series of delays — in part due to the same logistical and regulatory issues threatening shutdowns today — postponed the auction to Thursday.
---
The Helium Stewardship Act: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527
https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and-minerals/helium/stew...
---
And its been on the "todo list of the federal government for decades"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_storage_and_conservatio...
> ... Since 2013 the world's largest helium hub is no longer located in the United States of America but in Qatar, which produces 1.3 billion cubic feet of helium per year from a single project and meets 25% of the global demand. One challenge related to bringing new helium sources onto the market is that it usually requires venture capital financing. Another challenge is that the current selling price of U.S. Cliffside helium is too low to encourage more new producers to enter the field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_19...
I get that it might be weird to talk about producing "tons" of a gas that will float away into space if not contained, but it must still be better than talking about the amount of volume of gas being produced.
How much helium is in one cubic foot? That's up to you.
We barely do anymore; one of the main reasons the Party City chain went bankrupt was the sharp rise in the cost of helium. The other two were covid and private equity of course lol.
> The following year, the owners had Party City borrow $338 million to pay themselves a dividend.
Canada produces a lot of He-4 from natural gas and a huge proportion of the worlds tritium in its heavy water reactors. Most countries that produce tritium and He-3 tend to hoard it, but Canada is selling it cheap. If the U.S. wants to be forward looking, they should talk to Canada about a long-term tritium and helium supply contract.
Edit: Of course, I would imagine it would be in the interest of other countries to do the same while Canada is placing a premium on non-U.S. partnerships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Privatization_Act_of_19...
Basically equivalent at parties; much less fun for everyone involved in storing and transporting the hydrogen.
Edit: Yes, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/us-just-sold-heli...
Sold at a discount, then it becomes critical so its value gets a premium. What a coinkydink.
https://www.blm.gov/press-release/blm-helium-system-sale-pro...
Messer American is in a good spot now I suppose:
https://www.blm.gov/announcement/blm-accepts-bids-sale-feder...
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/16/751845378/episode-933-find-th...
A theoretical "vacuum filled" balloon would only be 16% more lift per unit volume than a helium balloon.
Balloon helium is just helium, broadly, at 98%+ concentration. It has a tiny amount of atmospheric gas, mostly nitrogen, in it as there is no need to go too far with purifying it, but there is zero intention of making it any safer to inhale. It is basically accidental contaminants.
If you inhale 98%+ helium, the diffusion gradient reverses and oxygen floods out of your blood. Did this once as a kid and actually blacked out. This is functionally just as true at 98% helium with some nitrogen and a tiny amount of oxygen as it is with 99.9999% helium. The difference for inhalation is a wash.
Inhaling helium is not advised. The protection we have, such as in my case, is that invariably our rapid physiological response stops us from inhaling helium and oxygen can return.
If there is a shortage of helium, it's a shortage of all the same helium. But so long as it's treated as a novelty gas, and so long as it continues to just be wasted, it's hard to take claims of a shortage too seriously.
As a fun fact, the vast majority of helium on Earth is courtesy of the radioactive alpha decay chain starting from heavy elements like Uranium and Thorium. Helium got trapped by the same geological formations that trapped natural gas, hence why they're usually found together despite being from completely different processes.
1. Russia's invasion of Ukraine disrupted Europe's established natural gas supply.
2. Europe needed more gas from alternative suppliers, including Algeria.
3. Algeria sent more gas through its pipeline to Spain rather than processing as much gas into LNG at Arzew.
4. Less gas passed through the LNG process that made helium recovery economical.
5. Helium production fell, even though the underground gas deposits could still contain helium.
C'mon... First, there's no infrastructure in the US to process the gas and purify to semi manufacturing levels. Second, as soon as the epstein war is done (either by Iran allowing navigation through Hormuz or the arab countries developing alternative routes), Helium orices will go back to be so low it doesn't make financial sense to purify unless you have the volumes they have. And by then, still no infrastructure would be ready for the task.
The helium reserve is so that when there's a war in the Middle East...
The US has drawn down on the first one substantially and sold the second one to the private sector a decade ago that had no interest in maintaining it.
Not true. As an example, Air Liquide tanks take semiconductor grade pure helium from Ladder Creek in Colorado to international semi labs:
https://electronics.airliquide.com/who-we-are/our-markets/se...
https://tumbleweedmidstream.com/
(I noticed now because Colorado has a weird Natural Gas bill on the docket)
It's everywhere. But extracting it is expensive and not very economical.
Most of the helium on the Earth is from radioactive decay.
The helium on the moon, however, is from capture from solar wind... and has a higher concentration of helium 3. https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Futur...
What happened here? Does the European Space Agency not have anyone who can proofread an English document? Why are they publishing in English?
Any helium we have comes from underground, which is why you can see discussion of "mining" helium upthread.
While it is true that helium escapes from the atmosphere, it is also produced continuously in the Earth's crust.
Thus there is an equilibrium concentration of helium in air, from generation and loss, and it is greater than for the heavier noble gases krypton and xenon, which do not escape from the atmosphere.
So there is more helium in air than krypton and xenon, which are nonetheless extracted from air, despite their low concentration. However, their extraction from air is easier than for helium, because when liquid air is evaporated the lighter and more abundant gases evaporate first and krypton and xenon remain in the small liquid residuum.