Author Topic: The search for "green" helium  (Read 742 times)

ergophobe

  • Inner Core
  • Hero Member
  • *
  • Posts: 9254
    • View Profile
The search for "green" helium
« on: December 18, 2021, 06:57:07 PM »
https://www.wired.com/story/green-helium-mining/

Quote
Helium is also very useful. It has the lowest boiling point and freezing point of any other known substance. And unlike hydrogen, its lighter and more abundant neighbor on the periodic table, it doesn’t go boom at the slightest provocation. All these characteristics have made it a critical resource in much of the technology that modern society relies on, from the semiconductor chips in computers and mobile phones to fiber-optic cables, MRI scanners, and rockets. There is no space race or high-speed internet without it.

Helium forms within Earth’s crust through radioactive decay, a process so slow that on a human timescale it’s considered a finite resource. (A block of uranium the size of a candy bar would take roughly 500 million years to produce enough helium to fill a party balloon.) For more than a century, it has been mined as a minor byproduct of natural gas extraction. But in the decades to come, as the world moves away from hydrocarbons and demand for helium grows in step with the aerospace, computing, and medical industries, there’s a looming possibility of a major shortage.

The Rukwa Basin is one potentially significant new source of helium. Here, the helium is “green”—naturally mixed with nitrogen, which can be safely vented into the atmosphere.

Quote
Next year, the BLM is expected to finally complete its sell-off of the National Helium Reserve. After that, prices are likely to soar and the US government will have to source helium from the private sector. (The other major source of helium in the US, ExxonMobil’s LaBarge field in Wyoming, may be vulnerable to environmental policy because the gas composition is 65 percent carbon dioxide.) Without new, large-scale sources of helium, it’s a probability that increasing global demand will rely on Qatar, whose antagonistic neighbors have previously blocked exports, and Russia, where new production is slowly coming online.