Helium sale offer

[dieseltaylor]

Professor Richardson warned the gas is not cheap because the supply is inexhaustible, but because of the Helium Privatisation Act passed in 1996 by the US Congress. The Act required the helium stores held underground near Amarillo in Texas to be sold off at a fixed rate by 2015 regardless of the market value, to pay off the original cost of the reserve. The Amarillo storage facility holds around half the Earth's stocks of helium: around a billion cubic meters of the gas. The US currently supplies around 80 percent of the world's helium supplies

http://www.physorg.com/news201853523.html

I was quite astonished at this arrticle. Apparently the US has 50% of one of the rarest gases on earth - helium - and is selling it off at a fixed price. This is daft because any body knows that a rare resource goes in value as stocks dwindle. More importantly with super-conductors becoming more common in the electrical field the demand for serious uses could rise rapidly. Is it something to do with being in Bush territory?

8MW Wind turbines using a superconductor motor would only require an 80 ton motor as opposed to a 450 ton motor.

Heating metal ingots for pressing requires only 50% of the power if the magnetic field is generated by a superconductor

Super-grids are another area of interest.

In any event the concept of selling a limited resource cheap should aggravate all US taxpayers! Write to your elected representatives now!

[Stalins Organ]

The National Helium Reserve was set up to ensuer a supply for airships, and is $1 billion in the red.

Methinks that there's no great need for it on thats score any more, and Helium is not in short supply - it comprises 1-2% of the volume of natural gas.

[dieseltaylor]

Say we do run out of helium - can't we just make the stuff from something else or purify it from the air?

There is no chemical means to make helium. The supplies we have on Earth come from radioactive alpha decay in rocks. Right now it's not commercially viable to recover helium from the air, so we have to rely on extracting it from rocks. But if we do run out altogether, we will have to recover helium from the air and it will cost 10,000 times what it does today.

The shortage of helium has been talked about for a while. Are things really getting that urgent now?

Maybe in Europe there has been a conversation, but not in the US - and the US supplies nearly 80 per cent of the helium used in the world. The problem is that these supplies will run out in a mere 25 years, and the US government has a policy of selling helium at a ridiculously low price.

What should the US government do instead?

Get out of the business and let the free market prevail. The consequence will be a rise in prices. Unfortunately, party balloons will be $100 each rather than $3 but we'll have to live with that. We will have to live with those prices eventually anyway.

Your response seems to miss the point that the gas is being sold at a non-commercial price - if it were sold by the Government for more then the US taxpayer would benefit rather than the profit going to private companies.

[ I did read the linked New Scientist article from which the quoted part comes]

There are other sources and competition but not all gasfields have recoverable helium. But as I do not yet know the selling price from the reserve and the commercial price in the open market I am rather reliant on what the scientists say as being a problem.

[Stalins Organ]

The thinking behind the pricing can be found in the executive summary of the report into releasing hte reserve - here

[dieseltaylor]

For something more up to date:

http://www.airproducts.com/PressRoom/PDF/Helium_on_the_Rise_Insert_CGI.pdf

Note their comments on short supply?

The full report is interesting though I have not read all the chapters and it seems a little light on hard prices. there is comment that implies the private industry is benefitting from the storage facility as the private companies pay only a share of current operating costs - the Federal Govt could charge a more commercial fee for storage and recover the $1billion . Which brings us to the point as to why the BLM never charged the rigt rate in the beginning ....

On a more cynical note you may wonder what happens when the Strategic store is reduced to a small amount and pricing is firmly in commercial hands.

[womble]

8MW Wind turbines using a superconductor motor would only require an 80 ton motor as opposed to a 450 ton motor.

Heating metal ingots for pressing requires only 50% of the power if the magnetic field is generated by a superconductor

So why don't they build such things out of superconductors? Because the cryogenics of Helium is expensive and difficult. Wind farms are currently pretty low-maintenance installations; that would change if they had to have a continuous supply of l-He (or even l-N₂ for 'high' temperature superconductors) and technicians to manage the cryogenics.

Super-grids are another area of interest.

Not as far as uses of helium are concerned. How do you cool thousands of miles of conductor to liquid helium temperatures? CERN has a hard enough job with a 27km tunnel. No, 'supergrids' aren't going to be built using cryogenic superconductors. The cost saving from eliminating transmission loss won't cover the cost of maintaining the supergrid at near-absolute zero.

When the 'holy grail' of "room temperature" superconductors is achieved, these applications will be routine, but even 70-odd K is pretty cold and limits the industrial usefulness of even 'high' temperature superconductors; Helium is too specialised and cold for widespread commercial application of low temperature SCs.

[Stalins Organ]

For something more up to date:

http://www.airproducts.com/PressRoom/PDF/Helium_on_the_Rise_Insert_CGI.pdf

Note their comments on short supply?

Yep - that the industry has not developed known supplies as fast as expected - ie there's no shortage of helium - there's a shortage of plants extracting it. And release of hte National Helium Reserve has helped alleviate that shortage of supply.

No doubt prices are affected by/have something to do with that.