I’m not really worried about any potential helium shortage. We are actually really good at extracting it, the problem is purely economics and as soon as prices get to the point where investment is warranted then there will continue to be adequate supplies. The main issue right now is the proper demand increase forecasts do not align with potential investments costs and helium extraction investment does just not make much economic sense given current forecast Helium costs.

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vlovich123 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If demand keeps growing (as it has been), we've got ~40-60 years of "cheap" reserves left. As helium prices start to increase, you've got price shocks down the supply chain.

There's about 40-70 billion cubic meters of economically recoverable (assuming future technology development + price increases). The complete total upper end of known geological reserves is ~60-100 billion cubic meters - that's about correct in terms of order of magnitude even if we find new deposits.

Current consumption is 180 million cubic meters/year. At a growth of 3%, you've got 80-140 years before we run out. At 5% growth it's 50-90 years.

Saying "I'm not worried about it" is true in the myopically selfish "I personally won't have to care about it". It's conceivable that your children will be dealing with it and definitely grandchildren in a very real existentially meaningful way.

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dtech 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's very hard if not impossible to do predictions over century timescales. How relevant are 1926 resource problems to today? If you wrote your comment in 1926 you would be talking about rubber, fertilizer, coal, wood or oil, and 4 out of those 5 are mostly solved today.

At those timescales, mining the moon or Jupiter for helium might be realistic, so the limits of earth are no longer upper bounds.

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pureliquidhw 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree century timescales are tough, I'm not convinced 4 of 5 of your listed things have been solved.

Rubber has been replaced with oil.

Fertilizer has been replaced with Natural Gas that comes from the same place as oil.

Coal usage has been replaced/displaced primarily by natural gas, see above.

Wood, or deforestation, was a real problem in the 1920's, but many uses were replaced by plastics (oil) and natural gas. Sustainable forestry helped a ton here too once it hit the paper industry's bottom line.

Oil is certainly not solved, so we solved 4 out of 5 with the 5th.

	▲	achierius an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly -- that means that any analysis based on the current (as of 1926) 'reserves' or 'production capacity' for rubber/fertilizer/coal/wood would have been invalidated as soon as we switched to using oil instead. Imagine if instead of harvesting helium directly we find an economic way to split nitrogen (somehow, who knows). At that point, what you'd have to have forecasted would be the 'reserves' of nitrogen, which are functionally infinite.

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ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We're definitely not mining the moon for helium, but might well end up "mining" the gas giants.

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victorbjorklund 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn’t those calculations pretty unreliable? It’s like those predictions we only have 5 or 10 years of oil left. And then we find more oil or better extraction process and we got another 10 years and so on.

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nomel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> As helium prices start to increase, you've got price shocks down the supply chain.

No shock at all if the price is relative to what's left. Shouldn't boring market pressures guarantee this, unless the government gets involved?

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wongarsu 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just in time to start extracting helium on Mars

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elzbardico 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe we will build chips in space in vacuum?

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cheschire 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> myopically selfish

A standard western personality trait I’ve been confronted with repeatedly over the last… hmm. Well that got depressing real quick.