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I know many in this audience might be familiar, but this story of helium disrupting the mems clock in the iPhone is so good: https://www.ifixit.com/News/11986/iphones-are-allergic-to-he...

The fact that there are these cities of silicon in our pockets is amazing: https://images.app.goo.gl/qnNSArgbfxPHTyqk7

Makes me wonder why it is so difficult to create an airtight package for the mems device, even considering that helium is small.

Also, what happens to an iPhone if you bring it near an ultrasound source with a carefully chosen frequency?

It’s difficult with helium because the atom is so small that it can effectively penetrate the gaps in the atomic structure of almost any solid material given time. Even solid iridium can have small amounts of helium leach through.

Re ultrasonics - for some MEMS devices yes this can absolutely break things, but because the devices are so small, the resonant frequencies can often be in the hundreds of KHz or even MHz and most ultrasound transducers only produce sub 100khz frequencies

I've been keenly observing this company as an investment oppurtunity:

https://royalheliumltd.com/projects/saskatchewan-helium-play...

Interesting! If you don't mind me asking, what is your thought process for investing in foreign companies (assuming you don't live in Africa)? Besides the S&P 500, I have always felt a little uncomfortable investing in any company that's not within a 60 (-ish) minute drive. I feel too divorced from reality and the physical process of buying and selling goods when they're far away.
I guess first off does that 60 minute drive mean driving to their headquarters or just a storefront?

But if you mean any kind of presence/impact than even companies quite far away can be found. You can find products made by companies across the globe literally in the device you are using right now. In my opinion that means a lot more than having a storefront by chance near by.

It's run by CPAs, not PGeos.. something to note. Very generally speaking, having a company run by technical professionals is better than having a company run by financial professionals.

Still, an interesting find, worth looking into.

I've heard this a lot recently in regard to Intel's latest CEO coming from an engineering background. I can intuit it, but is there something to back up this claim?
"Renergen estimates its helium reserve could be as much as 9.74 billion cubic meters—larger than the known reserves in the entire United States. That's enough to fill about 1.4 trillion party balloons."

I love it when articles have random units of measurements like that!

I'd like to point out that helium is used in science for many applications. For example, the superconducting magnets in MRI machines are cooled by helium. Since it is not renewable and escapes from the atmosphere easily, we should conserve it, and probably not use it for party balloons.
I was curious about this so given some numbers I found on the internet, an average MRI machine has about 1700 liters of liquid helium capacity and loses 48% of its helium over the course of a year.

1 liter of liquid helium expands to .74m^3 of gaseous helium at room temperature. A 16" party balloon has .042 m^3 of space, so requires .05 liters of liquid helium.

So one MRI machine can hold ~30,000 balloons worth of helium and leaks about 39 balloons per day.

Note: This is not to suggest helium that is used for balloons is being redirected from MRI machines. As the article states, helium is captured almost exclusively as a byproduct of natural gas mining and any excess helium not worth capturing is just vented off. Reducing demand for helium by eliminating party balloons would have no affect on the amount of helium that is released from the ground.

Helium is semi renewable. More is constantly created by underground decay of radioactive isotopes. But we're probably using it up faster.

Regardless of helium supplies, party balloons are problematic because they tend to escape and contaminate the environment with rubber and plastic. I frequently see empty mylar balloons floating in the ocean.

I wonder if that's going to continue to be the case with MRI machines? Some newer high-temperature superconductors (for instance ReBCO tape) don't need to be kept quite that cold. Eventually I'd expect machines based on newer materials to replace the old machines, unless there's some compelling reason why the helium-cooled machines are fundamentally better.

(I do agree we should conserve it rather than use it for frivolous purposes.)

Most definitely.

Interestingly enough, Google told me there are only 14 gasses that are lighter than air. They are:

* acetylene

* ammonia

* carbon monoxide

* diborane

* ethylene

* helium

* hydrogen

* hydrogen cyanide

* hydrogen fluoride

* methane

* methyl lithium

* neon

* nitrogen

* water vapor

Wiki lists most of them at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_gas , although it leaves out ethylene, methyl lithium, and diborane for some reason. It also doesn't explicitly list carbon monoxide, but talks about it under "coal gas."

Of those, only hydrogen and helium are even vaguely suitable for party balloons, due primarily to their nasty chemical properties and/or expense.

Parties are more fun with hydrogen, in any case.

... or a stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen+oxygen: https://youtu.be/l9CI6KSV560?t=1625

Honestly we should ban helium for frivolous use.
While I completely agree that waste is inexcusable and helium is really important there are many grades of helium and they are basically all industrial biproducts. The stuff at parties is mostly air and unsuitable for most scientific applications (checking leaks with a mass spec in a vacuum system is one of the few). Even the high grade welding/scientific stuff is little more than a biproduct of natural gas extraction. The value of helium recovered from a well is essentially nil compared to the natural gas, so it’s conservation is not really possible since there is no real market force regulating supply (we would basically need to restrict natural gas consumption to nil, which is a good idea long term but not really feasible for civilization at the current stage.
Not really random given most people interact with helium in the form of a balloon, however I would say that no one on Earth could comprehend 1.4 trillion balloons.
>I love it when articles have random units of measurements like that!

There's a uniquely British phenomenon where large areas are given in terms of Wales. I think it's probably down to our national inability to decide if we're metric or imperial.

Or enough to do about 1.6 trillion chipmunk impressions!
"I love it when articles have random units of measurements like that!"

There's a right way and a wrong way to deal with quantities. This is a right way:

https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

That's enough balloons to have another Cleveland balloon disaster! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0CT8zrw6lw
> I love it when articles have random units of measurements like that!

That's not really a random unit of measurement. It's the only use of helium the audience can be expected to be familiar with.

I wonder how many hard drives is that
I'm real curious in the details behind their $1 purchase of this asset that turned out to be worth billions. Smells shady to me.
Yeah this doesn't make sense to me either. If you assume the gas rights for all the land on the earth is priced that low (it isn't) you could buy all it for $1mm.

Also, I can't imagine the seller would be like "hmm, this guy wants to buy gas rights on 87,000 hectares of land for $1. Sounds like a good deal!" without thinking maybe there was something special and investigated for themselves first.

They own the land but not actually the minerals or gas - they still have to get a permit from the government to to extract.
This is good news for scuba divers. Helium prices have increased by a factor of 10×.
It's used in welding too sometimes, though argon and CO2 are used more. I think helium is recommended for TIG welding copper if you don't have a really high-powered rig since it allows for better heat transfer, but I've managed it with argon.
Tbh scuba diving is kind of a waste of helium, and I'd rather they not use a nonrenewable resource for recreation.
I am not sure how precious helium is. The fact we put it in party balloons would hint at helium being relatively cheap (though those party balloons are typically 10$ each in France).

On the other hand, I understand that it is a significant cost driver for industry.

The US maintained a strategic helium reserve for decades (originally for airships). Then people started producing helium as a by-product of natural gas drilling, and the government bought helium from private natural gas producers. The helium reserve became less important, and larger, and deeper in debt.

In the 90s, Congress ordered that the strategic helium reserve sell off most of its helium. That tanked the price, which meant it was affordable for party balloons. It also hurt the business of natural gas producers also producing helium.

But helium can also leak irrecoverably out the atmosphere. We should try to hold on to some of it.

It's much cheaper than it should be if we're considering hard limits on available supply and lack of interchangability of other resources. Honestly it shouldn't be cheap or expensive, in a perfect world it would be regulated, but here we are.

It's so cheap that it's commonly used as a welding cover gas as a way to reduce electricity cost and to squeeze more work out of cheaper, lower power equipment. Recycling in the form of capture of storage boil-off, or even collection/retention of helium that can be safely vented from legacy equipment costs substantially more than just throwing it away forever.

But it's useful in ways that nothing else is. MRI is the biggest example, and the largest consumer of helium. There's a whole niche of magnetics that needs helium until science comes up with better magnetics, if that's possible.

Something that doesn't get a lot of detailed attention is leak detection, because there's nothing else that leaks nearly as well (hydrogen molecules are larger than helium atoms!), not to mention safely, as helium. A leaking vacuum jacket means substantial loss of insulation and increased boil-off. Leaking storage of gases is always dangerous - either it's flammable, or poisonous, or an asphyxiant because it's not oxygen, or it is oxygen and everything else is on fire. The process of using helium used for leak detection involves introducing helium into a vessel and looking for helium on the other side. The leak detector itself is a portable mass spectrometer. Leak detection and repair is an extremely rare skill set at any meaningful level of quality, depends on extremely specialized equipment, and it's as expensive as it sounds. If there was a better option, this leak detection niche for helium would be an academic novelty.

Anyway, if this helium source is what it claims to be, it's significant - about 60 years of current production.

https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/helium-statistics-and-info...

It is currently cheap, but if it's all bled off into space through party balloons and we run low, it's not gonna be cheap any more.

With this news I guess it's not as precious as it was last month...

This could also help the planned helium cooled nuclear reactors like this one: https://usnc.com/mmr/
I wanna know who selling 87,000-hectares of land for $1
Gas rights for the land, not the land itself
> Natural gas is what Stefano Marani and Nick Mitchell had on their minds when they bought gas rights on this 87,000-hectare piece of land in the Free State province in 2012, for just $1.

How can someone sell the gas rights for just $1? Whatever they find must be worth more, no? Is there a tax involved when someone extracts resources?

> How can someone sell the gas rights for just $1...Is there a tax involved when someone extracts resources?

I don't know anything about South African law, but in my home (Alaska) these rights are typically put up for public auction, and yes, there is a further "severance tax" levied on any production that may eventually occur. The (relatively low) auction price is just to lock in exclusivity, generally for a limited length of time. One reason that the initial leases are low is that the actual amount of gas or oil on the property is generally unknown until you get out there and start drilling holes, or at least doing some seismic mapping.

If you find oil or gas and wind up producing it, you then have to pay taxes on that, but if there's nothing there, you haven't wasted your money.

Not all states have a severance tax, though.

Often the resources can be unproven (so a gamble) or uneconomic to extract (so net negative economically), combined with some degree of other liability like taxes, security issues, bad infrastructure that needs replacing, etc.

That can change if it turns out the actual resources are more valuable, easier to extract, or the liabilities can be resolved with significant investment. Sometimes people throw millions at things too, and don’t really break even. We can’t really see their books here, so we don’t know.

More curious as to why this is making news again now. Renergen and their 12% find has been know for a while. Like two years maybe? Recall toying with the idea of investing
How do you write an article like this and not mention the climate crisis?
Its not like climate change is new. Why would it be mentioned ?
I'm more interested in knowing how do I buy gas rights for 87,000 hectares for $1. Any pointers?
Probably the same way you'd get Steve Jobs to work for you for $1 per year. Have that be part of a much larger package and this is thrown in just to meet the legal requirements of compensation.
It's possible China already owns the rights via their Belt and Road loans.