The Other Deflationary Trend

Helium, after hydrogen, is the second most prevalent element in our solar system, but most of that gas is 93 million miles (149 million kilometers) away… on the Sun. Down here on earth, the gas isn’t so easy to find, so tough in fact that the biggest supplier in the United States… in the world for that matter… is the U.S. government, which generates this capacity from the Federal Helium Reserve in porous rocks near Amarillo, Texas. Since it is an inert gas, it cannot be found in molecular combination with other elements; you want helium, you have to find pure helium.

But like most natural resources, helium is not infinitely available. In fact, finding this gas in its natural state is really difficult, and the Federal Helium Reserve is projecting that it will run out in 25 years. After that, it’s catch as catch can in the open marketplace. Are you picturing unhappy clowns and teary-eyed children holding flaccid balloons at millions of little birthday parties all over the world? Seeing the Goodyear and MetLife blimps rusting in overgrown, weed-infested lots, sportscasters wondering what the overhead shot should look like at NFL games? No more advertising balloons drifting above car dealers in the September sale-a-thons? No more funny voices as folks try talking after inhaling a breath of that “squeaky” gas? That’s how most of us think of helium, but its other uses are no laughing matter.

I mean, after all, why would the federal government actually think it is important enough for them to maintain and control the largest helium supply on earth? Can this gas be that important for national security, or it this control simply a way to placate the political clowns who run the government from DC who are often filled with hot air and need a more refined gas? From nuclear research to medical technology, helium seems to have found an essential niche.

In 1996, Cornell Professor Robert Richardson won the Nobel Prize for his work with superfluid helium, and the non-“fun” uses of helium are substantial: “Anyone getting an MRI depends on helium, whose extremely stable, supercooling properties maintain the scanning machines' superconductive magnets. MRI machines account for more than a quarter of the helium used in the United States; it is also widely used in welding and provides the inert atmosphere necessary to manufacture optical fibers and liquid crystal display (LCD) screens… Helium is used to pressurize and purge the fuel tanks in NASA's rockets. It prevents the particle accelerators at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, from overheating.” Washington Post (October 11^th).

The U.S. consumes half the world’s helium, and remaining reserves seem to be focused mainly in Russia, Algeria and Quatar, where processing facilities exist; there are known fields in Canada, China and Poland as well. “But the Federal Helium Reserve is the only known place on the planet with the kind of rock formation that can store helium. In addition, the helium naturally occurring there is found at an unusually high concentration - it makes up about 2 percent of the reserve's natural gas, compared with less than 0.3 percent in most gas fields.” The Post.

Once helium floats into the atmosphere, as most of it eventually does, it cannot be extracted in any commercial sense and drifts inert into the air forever. Recycling this precious gas is very expensive, and if the price of the gas is relegated to the private market (particularly in nations that aren’t that friendly to us), the subsidized federal price will be replaced with vastly higher costs. There are a few smaller fields with possibilities here in the U.S. – one in Wyoming for example – but in times when the dollar is destined to fall, any resource that we are inevitably going to have to import hurts the economy and each one of us.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we don’t preserve and recycle this resource, then helium might not be healin’ him for much longer.