Silver, gold, oil, stocks, bonds, real estate! I won’t pretend to know more than the investment experts, but many people lost a lot of money following their advice. Why have these experts overlooked a resource that is guaranteed to rise– even if only within the confines of a lost balloon? Yes I’m talking about helium! Helium (He) is the second lightest element with an atomic number 2. Unlike hydrogen, which destroyed the Hindenburg, helium adds non-flammable fun to birthday parties. It also cools superconducting magnets in MRI medical scanners, helps with the manufacture of microchips and makes everyone sound just like Donald Duck.
Yes, we all know that helium is lighter than air, but what would cause the price of the universe’s second most abundant element to rise? Just as China manipulated the price of rare earth metals, and OPEC manipulates the price of oil, the US managed to build up a huge helium reserve and then dumped it onto the market. When this short-term supply dump ended, prices began to rise.
Nobel laureate Robert Richardson, professor of physics at New York’s Cornell University believes that if helium was allowed to seek its true price, a helium party balloon would cost about $100. That hasn’t happened yet but florists and party supply companies are already feeling the pinch.
One of the problems with helium is that when it leaks out of a party balloon or an airship, it eventually rises to the top of our atmosphere where the solar wind blows it away into outer space.
Nuclear reactions within the earth’s crust will eventually produce more but this can take millions of years. The rise in the price of helium is actually good news for parts of the Mideast. Most of the helium in the US reserve came from fractional distillation of natural gas from wells in Texas but natural gas reserves in the Mideast also contain helium. A helium refinery is already planned for Qatar.
When complete it will be the world’s largest helium refinery with an estimated capacity of 38 million cubic meters of helium per year. That’s enough to fill 2 billion party balloons every year. At that rate it will take more than 150 years to fill enough balloons to lift the great pyramid at Giza. So it really does pay to conserve your helium!
Helium balloon photo via Shutterstock
Author: Brian Nitz
Brian remembers when a single tear dredged up a nation's guilt. The tear belonged to an Italian-American actor known as Iron-Eyes Cody, the guilt was displaced from centuries of Native American mistreatment and redirected into a new environmental awareness. A 10-year-old Brian wondered, 'What are they... No, what are we doing to this country?' From a family of engineers, farmers and tinkerers Brian's father was a physics teacher. He remembers the day his father drove up to watch a coal power plant's new scrubbers turn smoke from dirty grey-back to steamy white. Surely technology would solve every problem. But then he noticed that breathing was difficult when the wind blew a certain way. While sailing, he often saw a yellow-brown line on the horizon. The stars were beginning to disappear. Gas mileage peaked when Reagan was still president. Solar panels installed in the 1970s were torn from roofs as they were no longer cost-effective to maintain. Racism, public policy and low oil prices transformed suburban life and cities began to sprawl out and absorb farmland. Brian only began to understand the root causes of "doughnut cities" when he moved to Ireland in 2001 and watched history repeat itself. Brian doesn't...
