Helium Mines

My problem--actually one of my many problems, but that's a long story--is that I don't understand where our supply of helium comes from. How is there helium trapped in the earth's crust that we can mine? Is it all from the decay of uranium?

Ah. Wikipedia comes through once again:

Helium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: After an oil drilling operation in 1903 in Dexter, Kansas, U.S. produced a gas geyser that would not burn, Kansas state geologist Erasmus Haworth collected samples of the escaping gas and took them back to the University of Kansas at Lawrence where, with the help of chemists Hamilton Cady and David McFarland, he discovered that... 1.84% of the gas sample was helium. Far from being a rare element, helium was present in vast quantities under the American Great Plains, available for extraction from natural gas. This put the United States in an excellent position to become the world's leading supplier of helium.... World War I... 200 thousand cubic feet (5,700 m3) of 92% helium was produced in the program even though only a few cubic feet (less than 100 liters) of the gas had previously been obtained... the world's first helium-filled airship, the U.S. Navy's C-7, which flew its maiden voyage from Hampton Roads, Virginia to Bolling Field in Washington, D.C. on 1 December 1921.... National Helium Reserve in 1925 at Amarillo, Texas with the goal of supplying military airships in time of war and commercial airships in peacetime. Due to a US military embargo against Germany that restricted helium supplies, the Hindenburg was forced to use hydrogen... the reserve was expanded in the 1950s to ensure a supply of liquid helium as a coolant....

By 1995, a billion cubic metres of the gas had been collected... "Helium Privatization Act of 1996."...

For many years the United States produced over 90% of commercially usable helium in the world. Extraction plants created in Canada, Poland, Russia, and other nations produced the remaining helium. In the mid 1990s, A new plant in Arzew, Algeria producing 600 million cubic feet (1.7×107 m3) came on stream, with enough production to cover all of Europe's demand. Subsequently, in 2004–2006 two additional plants, one in Ras Laffen, Qatar and the other in Skikda, Algeria were built, but as of early 2007, Ras Laffen is functioning at 50%, and Skikda has yet to start up. Algeria quickly became the second leading producer of helium....

Nearly all helium on Earth is a result of radioactive decay. The decay product is primarily found in minerals of uranium and thorium, including cleveites, pitchblende, carnotite and monazite, because they emit alpha particles, which consist of helium nuclei (He2+) to which electrons readily combine. In this way an estimated 3.4 litres of helium per year are generated per cubic kilometer of the Earth's crust....

The world's helium supply may be in danger, according to Washington University in St. Louis chemist Lee Sobotka. The largest reserve is in Texas and would run out in eight years if consumed at the current pace.... [H]elium is extracted by fractional distillation from natural gas, which contains up to 7% helium.... 2005, approximately one hundred and sixty million cubic meters of helium were extracted from natural gas or withdrawn from helium reserves, with approximately 83% from the United States, 11% from Algeria, and most of the remainder from Russia and Poland. In the United States, most helium is extracted from natural gas in Kansas and Texas...

Comments

[Domino]

Don't know why you're interested in Helium all of a sudden, but the last paragraph makes me think Australia would be a good place to look. Something like 40% of the world's uranium? If that's what makes helium, seems like a good bet there'd be some there.

[Old Ari]

It is called Helium because it was first detected in the sun, by it's spectrum. It was many years later that the actual material was discovered.

[Ian Whitchurch]

You think you have problems.

I know where some of it came from - the Cisco sands of Petrolia, in sunny Clay County Texas, just down the road from Wichita Falls (and thats Wichita Falls, Texas, not Wichita, Kansas).

So what, I hear you ask ?

The sands they pulled the Helium-bearing methane out of were at 1600 feet, and sealed by shales.

1600 feet. Sealed by shale. You give me three or four thousand feet of salt, heck three or four thousand feet of anhydrite, and I'll buy that helium can get sealed there for long enough. But a molecule as small as helium *should* have leaked out through those seals.

But it didnt.

Like I said, you think you have problems - you have an intellectual question of wanting to know where a useful industrial chemical comes from. I have some fecking geology that doesnt work the way it should.

PS Domino, you may wish to review Central Petroleum's recent ASX releases regarding Helium targets in the Heavietree Quartz in the Amadeus section of the Central Australian Superbasin. I have seen no evidence of helium in the Georgina (and my company has EP 127 and 128 there, so believe me I've checked the records).

[MattF]

Right-- underground helium is all from radioactive decay via alpha particles. Any primordial helium would have floated away long ago.

[bigTom]

I'm sure Ian has an important point. Uranium and Thorium are pretty common crustal elements, so the variation of the rate of generation of Helium is less important than the length of time it is trapped. Only a very well sealed reservoir will contain very much of it. It is kind of ironic that it is so rare, being that 24% of the (non dark matter) matter in the universe is Helium. It's just that a small planet such as the earth cannot hold onto it. Our nearest sources of primordial Helium are the Sun, and Jupiter, neither of which look to be promising sources any time soon. It is sad to see this scarce, and unique resource squandered on such friviolities as party balloons.

[pickledshark]

Party balloons making you sad bigTom? Turn that frown upside down and do what i do and and inhale the ballon helium towards the end of the party. Recycling helium for increased resource utility has never been funnier.

[NE1]

Helium scarcity (and recently, price increases) is a big deal. Our lab is switching to "dry" fridges that usually consume a good $2000 of liquid helium a week. Instead of using two helium isotopes in a distillation scheme to get down to 10 mKelvin, you can use a shock-tube to cool one end like a balloon after releasing all the air. Disregarding the current premium for the technology, actually running it (lots of electricity) is marginally cheaper at current prices. But it's also more convenient, in that cooling it down from 295 Kelvin is nearly a push-button operation instead of a 2-day nerve-wracking affair, and electricity doesn't have supply issues.

Plus, at most universities, the institution pays for juice anyways.

[psychohistorian]

Right. Lets keep driving that train right into the brick wall......

Just Plain Stupid

[anonymous 37]

Ah, NE1, I remember those days back in graduate school well. All that helium, all those low-temperature superconducting networks with their flux quantization. Good times, good times.

Wait a minute, no they weren't. I was completely miserable. But I do remember the know-nothing commentators chuckling over the idea of a helium reserve, as if the only use for helium was in party balloons. In addition to all the physics I learned, what I took away from those years was that science reporting, even in The New York Times, was pretty awful. If you knew anything about the subject, you could find an obvious howler in ten seconds of scanning the article.

[anonymous 37]

Wait a minute, two days, NE1? The thermal mass of whatever you're cooling down must be enormous.

[Alex Tolley]

whitchurch: 1600 feet. Sealed by shale. You give me three or four thousand feet of salt, heck three or four thousand feet of anhydrite, and I'll buy that helium can get sealed there for long enough. But a molecule as small as helium *should* have leaked out through those seals.

Any thoughts about why helium gets trapped under these "porous" strata?

[MattF]

Alex--

Just guessing here, but-- 1. Production of underground helium is continuous, so to get large amounts, you just have to get the creation rate greater than the leakage rate over a long period of time. 2. Radioactive decay produces a charged particle, so, it's possible that there could be some sort of local-polarization trapping that slows things down. 3. Since helium doesn't dissociate, it's a bigger particle than you might think and so is going to diffuse quite a bit more slowly than, e.g., hydrogen, which is basically just a proton.

[ZK]

NE1: Tell me about it. A year ago, we were paying about $5/liter for 4He. Nowadays, we pay $750 for a 100-L dewar that ends up getting delivered 3 days late and with 90 L at most. There should be a liquefier in the new physics building once it goes up, but I'll be long gone by then. Who makes your dry fridge? My advisor has looked into them, but he's skittish because of vibration and cooling power concerns...