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If helium balloons are on your shopping list for a Mother's Day or Graduation Ceremony, you've probably noticed that fewer stores fill balloons and those who do charge more. The cost of helium has increased by more than 250% in recent years and shortages have already begun because we use helium and can not produce more.
While it is the second most abundant element in the universe (behind hydrogen) and the Sun produces about 600 million metric tons per second, our reserves here on Earth are limited. Once he's gone, he's gone. We can not make more, and once used, the light element escapes into space.
The helium atom is smaller than any other element and only hydrogen is lighter. This makes it a very good lifting gas in applications such as balloons and airships. But helium has much more critical uses than birthday balloons.
Virtually all of our helium is extracted from natural gas, a byproduct of the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. Much of the extraction in the United States and around the world comes from underground gas fields located between Amarillo, Texas, and Hugoton, Kansas, where one can find a very high concentration, up to At 39%.
In the 1920s, when airships were a weapon of war, 90% of the helium extracted in the United States was destined for the Navy's airship program. In the 1950s, helium became an important part of the space program. In the 1960s, the Federal Helium Reserve was created. This unique system stores more than one third of the world's raw helium in the Cliffside gas field. Porous underground rocks overlying parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas hold back gases as a sponge contains a liquid, covered over with calcium anhydrite and on the sides by the 39; water.
The reserve continued to grow, but by the mid-1990s, airships were no longer part of the military. Congress ordered the government to withdraw from the helium market with the Helium Privatization Act of 1996. Although it helped pay the cost of the reserve, its sale Fast-paced prices below those of the market discouraged private competition as well as the conservation of this non-renewable resource reserve.
It was also about the demand for increased time. Today, helium is again on the list of essential elements for national security of the Ministry of the Interior, and the United States export only in the form of helium and hafnium, used in the manufacture of control rods for nuclear reactors.
The modern applications of helium come from the fact that it does not want much, even with other helium atoms. This makes it very stable and very useful in the aerospace industry to guide missiles, purge fuel lines and squeeze tanks. It also prevents air bubbles from entering the optical fibers during manufacturing.
These small atoms and these very low forces of attraction between them produce the lowest boiling point of the permanent gases, which makes it fantastic for cooling objects at extremely low temperatures. Liquid helium is used to cool superconducting magnets to a level just above absolute zero) in applications ranging from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines to the large Hadron Collider.
Congress amended the law in 2013, selling part of the reserve each year to the highest bidder. Despite daily profits of about $ 430,000, a 2015 study by the Government Accountability Office revealed that the 2013 law continued to discourage competition in new ways. The 2018 auction was awarded to a company, Air Products, based in Pennsylvania. The company also bought 77% of the 2017 auction.
The future of helium in the world remains uncertain. The federal government is committed to completing the elimination of the federal helium system, including the reserve, gas fields, pipeline and all infrastructure. The political unrest in Qatar, the other major source of natural gas producing helium, has also disrupted the industry in recent years.
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