The world is running out of helium — again

Lots of people count on helium. From MRI machines and semiconductor manufacturing to pressurizing rockets and detecting leaks, helium is used globally for much more than party balloons. So when there’s a shortage, like right now, the effect is far-reaching. But before the current shortage started, there was already a finite supply on Earth. So, today on Short Wave, we revisit our episode on the history of helium and how the world uses it today. If you liked this episode, check out our episode on aluminum's strange journey from precious metal to beer can https://lnk.to/cb36P9. Interested in more science in the news? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:20Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here with an episode on helium. The US is the largest supplier of the world's helium, which is used in, yes, party balloons, but it's also used in semiconductor manufacturing and in MRI machines. But helium is in the news this week for another reason. There's a shortage of it, again.

• 0:42Regina Barber?

  The second-largest supplier of helium is Qatar, which has recently been hit by missiles from Iran. And so the country isn't producing or selling helium at the moment. On top of that, there are the helium tanks sitting in the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway in the Middle East where a huge amount of the world's global shipping takes place. With the current conflict, much of that shipping traffic is closed, and goods are staying put, including helium, which will eventually leak out of the tanks they're in if they're not shipped in time. So we decided, let's revisit an episode with former host Maddie Sofia and science correspondent Jeff Brumfield. They get into the history of helium, including its discovery, and what it would mean if we ever truly run out of it.

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• 2:42Speaker 06

  All right, Jeff, here's what I know about helium. It's like the second most abundant element in the universe.

• 2:48Speaker 07

  That's true. Yep, good.

• 2:49Speaker 06

  It's not very dense, so sound travels faster through helium than normal air, which is why your voice sounds so high after you inhale it.

• 2:56Speaker 07

  You're starting to impress me.

• 2:58Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:58Speaker 07

  Keep going.

• 3:00Speaker 06

  It's a noble gas, which probably means it thinks it's better than the other gases.

• 3:05Speaker 07

  It certainly does.

• 3:06Speaker 06

  And that's what I know.

• 3:08Speaker 07

  That's a great primer on helium, but to understand it all, we need to go back to the very origin story of this element, which actually happened a year before the periodic table was rolled out.

• 3:20Speaker 07

  It was 1868, and the French astronomer Jules Jasan travels to India to observe an eclipse. He's studying the light coming from the corona around the sun, and he sees the signature of what he thinks might be a new element. Now, the British physicist Norman Lockyer follows up with his own observation and confirms it.

• 3:42Speaker 08

  And he called it helium in reference to the name of Helios, the sun god.

• 3:47Speaker 06

  I didn't even think about that.

• 3:48Speaker 08

  So that's, yeah, that's how it started.

• 3:51Speaker 07

  That, by the way, is helium historian David Aubin.

• 3:54Speaker 08

  I'm a professor for the history of science at Sorbonne University in Paris.

• 3:58Speaker 07

  But here's the thing.

• 4:01Speaker 07

  Although it's crystal clear there's tons of helium up in the sun, physicists can only find teeny tiny trace amounts on Earth. And do you know why?

• 4:10Speaker 06

  Because it was hiding.

• 4:13Speaker 06

  Because it rises?

• 4:16Speaker 07

  Yes, it literally just leaves the earth. It just floats up and it escapes the atmosphere. It's light enough, it goes off into space. And so any helium that's in our atmosphere will eventually work its way out of the atmosphere and into space.

• 4:30Speaker 06

  So it's out of here. It's like, no, I'm done with earth.

• 4:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, it's not interested.

• 4:34Speaker 06

  Can relate.

• 4:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. If the earth had a stronger gravitational pull, it could hold on to our helium like the sun does because the sun is enormous and it sucks all that helium in. Anyway, for a couple of decades, no one can find helium down here on the ground. But this changes in 1903 in a little town in Kansas called Dexter. Prospectors drill this well and gas just comes shooting out, nine million cubic feet each day. And the townspeople, yeah, that's a lot of gas. The townspeople think they've hit natural gas and they're all going to be rich. And so they get together and they decide they have this big celebration with music and speeches. And the climax of the whole thing is they're going to light that gusher.

• 5:18Speaker 06

  Like they're going to light the the gas on fire?

• 5:20Speaker 07

  Hey, man, Kansas, 1903. It sounds like a good time to me. Anyway, so they go through the whole rigmarole and they set this bale of hay on fire that they start prodding towards the gas pump. The gas hole. I told you the story of helium is fantastic. Anyway, so they they go through the entire celebration and they just really wish I'd been there.

• 5:46Speaker 06

  I know, you would have definitely been like, no, no, it's a good idea.

• 5:49Speaker 07

  I would have been pushing the bale of hay. Yeah. So they go through this whole celebration and, you know, the climax comes, they set this bale of hay on fire, they start prodding it towards the well, they push it over the hole and it goes out.

• 6:03Speaker 06

  So at this point, are like, are they like, oh, no, it must not have been natural gas. Are they like, do another bail? What's, what happens?

• 6:10Speaker 07

  You know, the historical records not provide an answer to that very interesting question, Maddie. But what this did prove was that there was more than natural gas in that well. And in fact, it was full of helium.

• 6:23Speaker 06

  Yes. That's where it's been hiding.

• 6:25Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 6:26Speaker 06

  So, OK, what is helium doing underground?

• 6:29Speaker 07

  Well, this is the really interesting thing. Helium on Earth is created by the natural radioactive decay of heavier elements like uranium and thorium, actually inside the Earth. When one of these atoms splits apart, bup, out comes an atom of helium. And as it accumulates inside the Earth, it kind of filters up because it likes to float, and then it gets trapped in these pockets in the crust.

• 6:54Speaker 06

  Helium pocket.

• 6:56Speaker 07

  So anyway, Dexter's discovery is-

• 6:58Speaker 06

  Did you get it? It was like Hot Pocket?

• 6:59Speaker 07

  Yeah. Now I get it.

• 7:01Speaker 06

  OK.

• 7:02Speaker 07

  I missed it the first time, but that was fantastic.

• 7:04Speaker 06

  Tell you know it's a good joke.

• 7:05Speaker 07

  So anyway, Dexter's discovery is a bust at first, but soon it becomes clear that this helium is actually pretty valuable because there is a great war brewing.

• 7:18Speaker 07

  World War I breaks out in Europe. Now, there are airplanes, but the Germans also have a secret weapon. The use of the airship as a weapon caught the Allies unprepared. The Zeppelin. For the first time in history, it was possible to carry a large cargo of bombs hundreds of miles by air to enemy territory.

• 7:36Speaker 06

  So we're talking attack blimps, Jeff?

• 7:39Speaker 07

  We've reached the attack blimp stage of the story. That's correct. These Zeppelins were actually used to bomb London during World War I. The Zeppelin, hidden in the clouds, was reasonably safe from attack and discovery. But they had- Kind of a big weakness. They were filled with highly flammable hydrogen.

• 8:01Speaker 06

  That'll get you.

• 8:02Speaker 07

  So that kind of put an end to the raids. But helium is not flammable. Helium dirigibles could help the US win the war. So the US government takes control of the helium supply and went to work readying its own attack blimps.

• 8:18Speaker 08

  They had cylinders filled of helium on the docks in New Orleans, ready to be shipped to Europe in November 1918. So it would have been used very soon.

• 8:29Speaker 07

  The war actually ended before the US ever used its helium. Interestingly, though, helium found a new life after World War II with a new technology.

• 8:41Speaker 07

  In the space race. It turns out rockets need a gas to help push the fuel out through the engines. And you need something that's, first of all, lightweight.

• 8:53Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 8:53Speaker 07

  Highly compressible.

• 8:56Speaker 07

  Chemically inert because you don't want it reacting with all those volatile chemicals that are in the fuel and stuff.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  So it's helium?

• 9:06Speaker 07

  It's helium.

• 9:14Speaker 07

  Helium was actually used in every stage of the Apollo program, from the giant Saturn V rocket to the lunar lander when it took off. It used helium to make its engine run.

• 9:25Speaker 06

  Thanks, helium.

• 9:26Speaker 07

  So, yeah, helium is still used in rockets today, but helium's uses don't stop there, Matty. In fact, we're in a new age of helium. It's because of another remarkable property. It can be cooled down to very low temperatures. It becomes liquid at 4.2 Kelvin.

• 9:42Speaker 06

  Which is real, real cold.

• 9:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. To put it in perspective, I spoke to a chemist named Sophia Hayes.

• 9:47Speaker 09

  Sometimes my astrophysics colleagues tell me that the temperature of outer space is 3 Kelvin. So it's just one degree different from the temperature of outer space.

• 9:57Speaker 06

  Oh my goodness.

• 9:58Speaker 07

  That's particularly useful for Sophia because her lab at Washington University in St. Louis uses a very special type of material called a superconductor. And basically, these are materials where when they get cold enough, electricity can flow through them with no resistance at all.

• 10:16Speaker 09

  And that creates very, very, very large magnetic fields. And so that superconducting state is only reached at low temperatures like that provided by liquid helium.

• 10:26Speaker 07

  So she uses liquid helium in magnets, and she uses these magnets for something called nuclear magnetic resonance. She uses it to study materials, but it's basically the same technology as something you may have heard of, magnetic resonance imaging.

• 10:42Speaker 06

  Like, we're talking MRIs that we use on people.

• 10:45Speaker 07

  Exactly. And MRIs are actually a part of the reason that helium is in such short supply now because MRI machines all over the world use helium, and they use liquid helium, which is much denser than the stuff in these balloons. So, you know, they need a lot of it. But there are only really three places in the world that produce most of the world's helium: Algeria, Qatar, and the US. So say there's a crisis in the Gulf.

• 11:12Speaker 09

  Every researcher in these associations will sometimes be watching those news stories and think, uh-oh, there's going to be a cutback in our supply.

• 11:24Speaker 06

  I mean, I know, I know a lot of scientists that are worried, like that work with lasers and that kind of stuff, are worried about helium in general.

• 11:30Speaker 07

  That's right. And it's really an issue of volatility because the prices can go up and down so much that Sophia actually had to shut down some of her magnets.

• 11:39Speaker 09

  Those are very high capital cost pieces of equipment. And for want of a chemical to sustain it, the liquid helium, we are taking those offline, making smaller the number of experiments that one can do, or maybe even shrinking the size of the research groups.

• 11:57Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 11:58Speaker 07

  And I mean, the problem is going to grow for the scientific community. Maybe you've heard about this new Google quantum computer that supposedly has beaten out classical computers at certain calculations. Well, it uses helium to cool the chip.

• 12:13Speaker 06

  OK, so MRIs, quantum computers, scientific research, is this all kind of coming to a head? Like, are we running out of helium, Jeff?

• 12:22Speaker 07

  You know, when I spoke to Sophia Hayes, I was worried about that. It turns out there are other natural gas fields in other parts of the world that do produce helium, and they're not being hardest right now. Some of them are planning to step up production. So that should help in the short term. But eventually, we are probably going to run out. Because once it gets out, you know, into the atmosphere, it's flown off into space, it's not coming back.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  But what about it being like naturally made during the radioactive decay stuff you talked about?

• 12:50Speaker 07

  That's true, but that all happens one atom at a time. And it takes a long time to accumulate even enough helium to fill a balloon. So nobody knows, of course, exactly how much uranium is in the earth and where it all is. But if we had to guess, we would guess that the accumulated helium is going to run out at some point.

• 13:11Speaker 06

  Well, now I feel like garbage because we've got these three helium balloons just sitting in here doing nothing.

• 13:15Speaker 07

  Well, I asked Sophia how she felt about helium balloons.

• 13:19Speaker 09

  OK, that's a, that's a tough one. And there's a lot of debate in my community of researchers who really value the helium every puff, if you will. I will say I am not a balloon denier, in part because I think the helium that's used for party balloons gets every person almost to care about this resource. Whereas if I say, how do you feel about argon? You may not have an opinion about argon, which is another inert gas.

• 13:49Speaker 06

  I do have thoughts about argon. Jeff, she's incorrect, but that will be a later episode.

• 13:53Speaker 07

  Well, I'd be happy to come back and do this again, Maddie.

• 13:56Speaker 06

  All right, Jeff, knock open one of those helium balloons. Let's do this.

• 14:01Speaker 07

  You got it. Do we have scissors?

• 14:04Speaker 06

  I mean, you have nature scissors, which are your teeth.

• 14:10Speaker 10

  OK, Jeff Brumfiel, thank you for coming by.

• 14:14Speaker 10

  It's been an absolute pleasure, Matty.

• 14:20Speaker 10

  I'm Matty Safia, and this is Short Wave from NPR.

• 14:27Speaker 10

  Nailed it.

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