I live near a business that has tank farms and piping for pressurized gases. They provide a lot of oxygen for health care use. If they can “manufacture” a gas, why can’t they make more helium?
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You can’t really *make* helium (or oxygen, for that matter) out of other elements without using nuclear fusion or fission. You *can* extract oxygen out of air (air is about 1/5th oxygen), or out of water (because water is made of oxygen and hydrogen).
Helium, on the other hand, is a lot harder to come across in large quantities on Earth.
Helium is generally gotten when it’s found trapped in natural gas wells (the same rock formations that trap gas may trap helium that’s rising from natural decay of the Earth’s Uranium). During World War I, when blimps were new thought to possibly become a strategic material (the nation with helium would have more blimps than other nations). So the US government created a strategic reserve of Helium shortly after the war.
Long after helium stopped being a strategic gas, the US still had this reserve. Until congress said why are we paying money to keep helium for war blimps almost a century after anyone has used a war blimp?
Then congress passed a law that said sell of the helium in the reserve, and the way to sell off many years of helium production is to sell it cheap. That meant two important things. First if you found e helium in your gas well, you were going to be competing with someone who has no cost and hates helium trying to sell it and two it was cheap enough for a lot of low value uses.
The shortage arose because several decades after congress said sell off that stupid helium, they finally have. So now people have to pay the real price for helium, they can’t buy cheap government helium because they don’t want to own it any more. Further it’s going to take time for the gas wells rich in helium to invest in equipment to capture the now valuable helium to sell (before it was money wasted because the government would just further reduce the price).
Wow, thank you all for the comprehensive answers! I had been wondering about this for a while now.
There’s a shortage of everything, mostly common sense.
We now live in a world where all you need to do is cry shortage and you can jack your prices through the roof.
HOTDOG SHORTAGE, SORRY. NO MORE 2 FOR 1$. It’s $3 for 1 or GTFO. I only have TWO PACKS LEFT AND HALF A BUN. PAY ME AND GET OUT.
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>If they can “manufacture” a gas, why can’t they make more helium?
They can’t. Businesses that “make” oxygen are just collecting it from the air, which is ~21% oxygen. They’re not *making* it, they’re just filtering it out of a mixture.
The atmosphere has essentially no helium in it, so that approach doesn’t work. It’s too light and rises up until it drifts away into space. Surprisingly, helium has to be mined from underground! It’s a product of radioactive decay, so sometimes when conditions are just right you happen to get some radioactive minerals and a gas-tight underground cavity nearby that can collect some helium over thousands of years as the radioactive stuff breaks down. Then we need to find these pockets, drill into them, and collect the lighter-than-air helium without losing it.
TLDR: Helium much scarcer than oxygen on Earth, harder to find, more expensive to access and store, and cannot be “made” in any practical manner.
Helium is very light (about 1/8 of the mass of oxygen) but molecules of all gases take up the same amount of space. As a result, helium has a very low density and the lower something’s density is, the higher up it will rise compared to other fluids.
Helium is so light that it can escape earth’s gravity and drift out into space, so the gas doesn’t get recycled or recovered (e.g. from party balloons or all of the gas in the Goodyear blimp). It also can’t be “manufactured” since helium is an element; the only source of new helium we have on earth comes when large atoms like uranium decay radioactively.
All of this means that the supply of helium is massively limited.
You can’t just “make” helium. In essence, you have to “mine” it.
Ironically, helium is the second-most abundant element in the universe but it is extremely rare on earth. Since it’s so light, it just floats above the air and into space, where it’s lost forever. Almost all of the helium available to us is underground in natural gas deposits, and they are a finite resource.
Hydrogen has a lot of the same problems, but unlike helium it readily bonds with other elements (like oxygen, to make water) and can be separated out using chemical processes. Helium, on the other hand, is almost totally inert and does not form compounds.
Oxygen, Helium and Nitrogen Gases are not manufactured they are refined from something that contains them. They don’t “make” Helium, because Helium is a basic element. In most cases they get Helium as a by-product of natural gas refining.
You can’t manufacture helium. At least not on a viable scale.
Oxygen is easy to extract from the atmosphere, there’s loads of it in there. Nitrogen even more so. Carbon dioxide is easy enough too. Chlorine isn’t too hard as you can use electrolysis on salts. Ditto Bromine. Hydrogen can be obtained by electrolysis on water (oxygen also). Things like Argon and Radon are in the atmosphere in low quantities but are there so you can extract them.
Helium pretty much isn’t. It doesn’t react with anything so you can’t extract it from another molecule, and it’s much much less dense than air so when released rises to the top of the atmosphere and then escapes.
All helium on earth is the result of radioactive decay – some elements release “alpha particles” when they decay, these are a fast moving helium nucleus that promptly snatches a couple of electrons and turns into helium. When radioactive elements buried deep underground decay the freshly minted helium can’t go anywhere, so it builds up. When this built up helium makes it into gas reserves and can get extracted along with the rest of the target gas. It isn’t very economical to harvest off the helium so it mostly gets let go.
For a long time the US government made companies harvest it – partly to use in blimps – but they stopped. They were sitting on giant stored reserves of helium, but that costs money to maintain so they sold it off over the years, and now reserves are getting low enough it’s getting expensive to get enough helium for things we use it for.
Mandating helium capture from natural gas extraction would help some, though might be a while before that’s implemented.
And no – there’s no realistic way to generate enough helium via radioactive decay in nuclear reactors and so on. It would cost a fortune to get enough to fill a party balloon.
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