Balloons are a very small portion of helium usage and the helium used is not usually pure enough to be put towards more important applications anyways.
It's continually generated from radioactive decay. As long as the generation rate is higher than the escape rate, you'll end up with helium reservoirs.
Once we've opened up all the world's reservoirs though, that'll be it for cheap helium.
Turns out solid rock can be rather impermeable, even to light gasses. There is a reason most He production was a side effect of the oil and gas industry, they're the people who need to drill through solid rock to get the hydrocarbons.
As you drill down, so many of the layers of "solid rock" that would be strong enough to use as building stone, are actually somewhat porous to very porous, and the oils & gases are contained within the pores at generally higher pressures and temperatures as the depth increases.
Depending on where you drill, you may encounter a layer of salt, maybe about like if some extensive undersea landscapes had been coated in salt as their waters evaporated, then had become buried under thousands of feet of overburden stone during geologic time.
When drilling some exploratory oil & gas wells, as the anticipated pay zone is approached, the process will be halted and the entire drill string withdrawn from the borehole, to replace the regular drill bit with a hollow coring bit assembly.
With an accurate knowledge of how deep they begin taking core samples, the drilling picks up where it left off and these samples are brought to the surface for examination and experimentation. You mainly end up with a cylindrical column of rock sample a few feet long and 3 or 4 inches in diameter. Rarely is it all in one piece since any unconsolidated layers are natural discontinuities, and weak spots often fracture during rapid transportation from the field geologist, to the laboratory geologist. In the field they would be boxed in cardboard and marked in order with the best estimate of the footage depth of each layer contained in each box. Core samples from the pay zone or close to it can be literally oozing oil & gas out of the "solid rock" for hours after initial examination.
Anyway, every now and then there will be a core where it looks like a few inches to few feet or so of fairly clear glass instead of rock layers, that is the salt they drilled through to get deep enough to reach any oil or gas accumulated below. Basically lighter gases rise higher than liquids from much deeper below the pay zones for eons, and collect best under the strata that are lesser in permeability & porosity. And layers of glassy salt are some of the least permeable subsurface formations.
Helium has been running out .. this doesn't change that.
> when they're proven wrong.
How so? The article clearly states that a feasibility study hasn't yet been completed.
Can you outline what the national|global He demand is and by how much this increases supply?
If not, your comment seems like baseless opinion.
Addendum: Here's a starter for current US domestic sales and consumption:
In 2023, the estimated sales of Grade-A helium (99.997% helium or greater) and gaseous helium (generally greater than 98% helium) was an estimated 79 million cubic meters (2.8 billion cubic feet) valued at an estimated $1.1 billion.
In 2023, US production from natural gas was 60 million cubic meters
In 2023, estimated domestic apparent consumption of Grade-A and gaseous helium was 59 million cubic meters (2.1 billion cubic feet), and it was used for, in decreasing quantity of use, analytical, engineering, lab, science, and specialty gases (21%); controlled atmospheres, fiber optics, and semiconductors (17%); magnetic resonance imaging (17%); lifting gas (16%); aerospace, pressuring, and purging (9%); welding (8%); leak detection (5%); diving (4%); and various other minor applications (3%).
I don't need to see the end result to make the claim - the doomsayers miss the basic economic principle about incentives changing with prices. They extrapolate trend lines out without realizing that every time something starts to "run out" people change their behavior in a way to either reduce demand, increase supply, or find alternatives.
This happens time and time again. Oil is the most obvious example, but helium fulfills this pattern as well, and was worsened by the government meddling in the supply, effectively destroying the private industry generations ago. Despite that, and helium being non-renewable without many alternatives, I'm still confident we won't run out without needing to dive into supply and demand numbers.
Helium can't run out. Ever. Or actually it can, but in about 10 billion years or so.
Helium is alpha particles produced in the decay chain of uranium and thorium deep inside the planet. It's being produced continuously, and it seeps upward. It stops in the pockets where other gases stop, and whatever forms there is called "natural gas". Helium is present in all natural gas, but it generally it is in a small enough concentration to not be worth separating. The price of helium is about 100 times the price of natural gas, so if a given natural gas field has a concentration of 1% helium, and you separate that and you sell it, you double your profits. But most often the concentration is 0.1% or lower, so after the additional separation costs it's not worth the trouble.
But when you have a field that yields more than 12% helium, you bet it's super profitable to separate it and sell it.
> Helium is alpha particles produced in the decay chain of uranium and thorium deep inside the planet.
Throughout the planet, but the overwhelming bulk of Helium that we humans can access comes from the crust layers .. intense pressure limits the seepage for deep helium and the crust is littered with U-K-Th rich deposits that express both radon and helium.
> Helium can't run out
Human production of usable helium at feasible prices can fall below human demand though, the obvious context missing from and otherwise interesting comment.
Demand exceeding supply changes the feasibility bar, but there's still a limit to fresh field sizes and extraction rates.
> But when you have a field that yields more than 12% helium
But does it meaningfully shift the human supply|demand balnce on the global market, and if so for how long .. this is the relevant resource availability metric.
> Demand exceeding supply changes the feasibility bar, but there's still a limit to fresh field sizes and extraction rates.
Not really. If at 100x the natural gas price, helium is profitable in concentrations above 1%, then at 1000x it is profitable in concentrations above 0.1%. We produce every year several billion tons of natural gas. The helium that we don't bother to separate from the natural gas we produce exceeds the world needs by a factor of 100 easily. But if the price goes up by a factor of 10, we'd instantly find out we have all the helium we need.
The era of cheap helium is over–and that's already causing problems
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39545134