Devils advocate but if all natural gas use was made obsolete by nuclear or some magic renewable... we’re still going to mine natural gas for the helium then as the primary product.
Just like imo we’re going to use every drop of oil for plastics, lubricants, composites, military and legacy applications.
> Just like imo we’re going to use every drop of oil for plastics, lubricants, composites, military and legacy applications.
Still a pretty open question. Those uses are powerfully subsidized by the fuel applications- aside from military use, all the things you listed add up to <2% of all oil. There is a massive oversupply.
Oil processing involves reforming molecules catalytically into other forms of hydrocarbons. It's not just separation. If fossil prices increased substantially, it would be very difficult to predict if natural hydrocarbon sources would be cheaper. Natural oils are quite cheap but narrowly distributed, unlike crude oil, and form different mixes when reformed by various processes.
The bottom line you should take away is that we absolutely don't need oil. We could replace it totally with natural sources using essentially our current product chain (eg steam cracking facilities) at a very reasonable cost. It's far and away the smallest problem with not using oil. To put that in context, it's a smaller problem than making steel without coal/coke, which is a solved problem. India makes nearly all their steel with natural gas.
I'll also point out that silicones are much better products for most lubricant and plastic/rubber uses. Oil is cheap and usually inferior, except for most engineering plastics.
> I’ll also point out that silicones are much better products for most lubricant and plastic/rubber uses. Oil is cheap and usually inferior, except for most engineering plastics.
Oh? What industry are you in and do you have a source for that statement?
Because you see car oil synthetics are preferred over mineral maybe?
Because 20 years in automotive and composites says that’s full fantasy.
Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil. It’s a oil derived plastic that’s burnt and spun and burnt again while being treated with more oil. It’s non-recyclable and pretty damn dirty, I’ve yet to see a carbon that was oil free, but please let me know when you have found one!
Oil is used in the transmission and engine. The bearings and most sealed gearboxes use silicone grease. Lots of dampers use silicone oils. In consumer products and anything sealed, silicones are far more common and heavily preferred. PDMS for instance has rheological properties that make it almost flat out better; it spreads and covers surfaces extremely well. As a bonus it has better thermal and chemical resistance.
Silicone rubbers are well known to have far superior mechanical and chemical properties than carbon-based rubbers. 99.9% of the time the only factor is cost. N-butyl and urethane have some advantages for certain chemicals, which is almost never relevant. Silicone plastics are at least as good as common plastics like PVC, ABS, HDPE etc. Fancier stuff like flouropolymers, definitely not.
> Because you see car oil synthetics are preferred over mineral maybe?
Is this some kind of gotcha you're trying to set up? Synthetic oils are not silicones.
> Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil.
NB that I was specific- lubricants, plastic, and rubber. There is a composite made from silicon... Fiberglass. It's orders of magnitude more common than CFRP and in many applications s-glass is both stronger and lighter. Still bonded with carbon, of course.
Overall you're responding to an argument that I am not making.
>Just ONE example off the top of my head, carbon fiber, is almost entirely oil.
Context friend.
Carbon as in carbon the topic of carbon fiber. OR - please share your process of taking charcoal and getting carbon FIBER from it, we'll be billionaires!
> "we’re still going to mine natural gas for the helium then as the primary product"
I don't see why. The US has for quite some time been trying to get rid of its helium reserve. Helium has plenty of interesting uses, but it's not valuable enough to justify mining natural gas just for the helium.
The price of helium will rise as the supply is used up. Does helium/natural gas mining simply cost too much to make up for any reasonable change in price?
Helium is a by-product of fission, but the product of fusion. The formation from alpha-particles around fission reactions (and the amount being like 100g/year?) makes it not very worthwhile to collect.
What's the distinction between product and by-product then?
I called it a 'by-product' because it's not the product we're actually aiming for, not the point of the exercise - if oxygen were produced instead (by whatever science-ignoring magic) we wouldn't mind.
So in the North Sea, where flaring gas at high volumes (as another poster mentioned) is banned, this is actually done a lot. Typically you have a field producing lots of oil and some gas ("associated gas"). Building infrastructure and pipelines to process and ship out the gas is too expensive given the small volumes, so the natural gas is reinjected into the reservoir, only the oil is produced and exported. Then after the oil production becomes depleted after many years, one can switch to producing the (now more concentrated) natural gas.
Apart from reducing CO2 emissions and giving potential for future profits from gas production, the reinjection strategy also maintains higher reservoir pressure thus boosting oil production. The fact that gas is flared at some fields speaks volumes of how crazy the oil industry is.
The Statfjord field is a prime example of a field with reinjection and subsequent gas production.
It’s discarded today. Natural gas itself is a byproduct of drilling for oil, and there are places where, due to a lack of convenient pipelines for transporting it, huge quantities of natural gas are just burned as waste.
I appreciate your optimism but unless you're talking about harvesting the fallout of fission bombs fusion probably won't be a practical source of helium for quite some time.
As for harvesting gas giants imagine the costs involved to send a ship close enough to one of these monsters to harvest a significant amount of helium, then manage to escape the gravity well and make it back to us. That would probably be end up being the most expensive substance on earth.
ITER would produce 150kg of helium a year in steady state operation. It’s not clear how close to that’s it’s going to be, but it’s going to be producing some helium unlike those other methods mentioned.
Of course that’s currently only worth ~6,000$ so it’s not being collected. But, if that’s the only option at 100,000x current prices it might be used.
Hypothetically, if 30% of the world’s electricity was generated by fusion they would be producing ~350,000 kg of helium per year. Still well below current production, but also not an insignificant amount.
> manage to escape the gravity well and make it back to us.
A more efficient design would probably be to have a miner full-time there, sending payloads in higher orbit, and a transport ship that approaches on a parabolic orbit, so it only needs engines to accelerate the payload, counteract friction and adjust trajectory
Regardless of how many complications you had you still need to get the mass of "mined" helium out of the gravity well, you can't avoid that. That means that you'll also have to lift whatever type of canister used to contain the gas and the propellant to reach your transport ship.
I suppose that the good news is that wherever you're getting your helium from you'll probably also have copious quantities of hydrogen available so you won't have to carry that over. Managing to oxidize it however is left as an exercise to the reader (apparently there's a tiny amount of water in Jupiter, but of course then you'd need some other energy source to electrolize it).
> That means that you'll also have to lift whatever type of canister used to contain the gas and the propellant to reach your transport ship.
Or you just push it through a pipe, space-elevator style, exactly how many hard science fiction authors do it for mining gas giants for reaction mass/other fuel.
Should be considerably cheaper from an energy standpoint.
If you're to a point where you can create such a station and manage regular transport between two bodies, you're going to be able to build some sort of pipe that should be able to contain the helium enough to pump it far enough out to considerably reduce the cost of leaving orbit.
To make it even more cost effective we could have a clone of a miner work there in a 3 year contract, unaware that he is a clone. As the contact approaches he would be replaced with a new clone and things would start all over again.
Although it would take a lot of energy to escape the gravity well of a gas giant, all of the gas giants are also far away from the sun. In the case of Uranus, this means that there is more energy to be gained from dropping towards the Sun to Earth than would be lost by escaping Uranus' gravity well.
So, one could imagine a siphon which would take helium from Uranus to Earth. A normal siphon moves a liquid out of a gravity well by relying on a deeper gravity well. Of course, there a limits to the height that siphons can handle, based upon the vapor pressure of the fluid, and the idea of running a really long tube from one planet to another is kind of ridiculous. However, the same energy differences could be used in principle to power a more realistic scale system, like a recirculating ship which gains kinetic energy on the Uranus-Earth run and loses it on the pick-up-helium-at-Uranus run. Such a system would need to dump angular momentum around the Sun at one of the planets, because this doesn't balance when you move mass from one planet to another.
My inner five-year-old loves the idea of mining gas from Uranus. :)
Cost depends on quantity. If it returned a few kilograms or grams, it'd probably be extremely expensive (although rare isotopes would be more expensive, they're measured in nanograms).
If you managed to produce ten thousand tons per year (out of a market of about 25,000-30,000 tons per year currently, although perhaps set to grow along with the global economy), the cost could be manageable.
It depends on launch costs and cost per kg of the material. Market price of refined helium is what, around $40-100/kg? Maybe up to $400/kg in the case of supply crunches and in refined liquid form?
And it probably depends on development of nuclear thermal rockets/ramjets to enable you to reach orbital velocity of Uranus in one or two reusable stages. As well as improved thermal protection systems (TPS) to enable reusable TPS at the higher velocities of reentry for Uranus. Currently, with chemical rockets, we can probably get costs down to $10/kg for bulk liquids to LEO (see here: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/making_life_multip... slide 41, do the math and the tanker costs per kg of propellant to LEO is less than $10/kg to LEO).
It's not impossible for nuclear thermal rockets to get prices down low enough. Even assuming fairly low efficiency (say, 1000s Isp with about 20 kg of propellant needing to be expelled for each kg of payload to escape velocity... taking into account dry mass ratio of about 20 due to the exponential rocket equation and Uranus's 21.5km/s escape velocity) and non-breeder reactors (where the fuel cost is about $0.15/MWh), the energy cost of the uranium to push a kilogram of material from the cloud layer of Uranus to escape velocity is still on the order of cents per kg. Of course, it then requires years in transit, so it'd only be feasible if financial/market conditions were exceedingly stable.
So in principle, it's possible to imagine that in 100 years hence, it could be feasible to mine Uranus for helium and meet near-current market prices. But the current ~$2 billion/year market for helium is probably much too small. But when it's a more-lucrative $20 billion/year market? More realistic.
But helium-3 for low(ish) neutron fusion may be a larger market by then, and THAT could be a significant market as well, with less challenge for getting price per kg to orbit reasonable (say, on the order of $10,000/kg or more for energy purposes, and it may be feasible to use expendable rockets for such small amounts of material, thus avoiding the more extreme performance requirements for the TPS and structure). Perhaps helium-4 mining would be an off-shoot of helium-3 mining, then.
The only one remotely feasible is the solar windcatcher, of these.
But you forgot a few: mining asteroids, catching comets, processing huge amounts of lunar regolith and prospecting for Earth sources.
Which are almost possible and economical, compared to the rest. In fact the latter is being done.
mining the gas giants. The amount of matter in fusion, or created by fission byproducts is minuscule. unless we do so much fusion that the absolute amounts become close to the amount of natural gas.
Also if rates of production and consumption aren't the same (not saying this is the case).
If we consume 0.1 lbs of helium for every 1.0 lb of natural gas, but only produce 0.05lbs of helium for every 1.0 lb of natural gas then the helium byproduct from natural gas is not sufficient to meet demand.
But that might also price out plenty of much better uses for helium as well if they are less funded than those with recreational demand. A market is not always a good way to allocate resources, especially in cases like this where the use cases are so wildly different in utility
You can't speak about Supply (running out) without factoring in Demand & Price. They are all linked together. Especially when the resource has recreational uses.
Not this one. The answer is yes, we will run out of helium, it is one of the few truly non-renewable resources. You can use chemical processes to make methane or petroleum-equivalents, and coal can be replaced with charcoal, but once all the helium atoms have drifted off into space, they're gone forever.
Though I agree that it is a resource we need to conserve, this article only uses data from before the discovery of the Tanzania helium deposits. Leaving them out makes me wonder why they wrote this article.
This most certainly is not fear mongering. Helium is a non renewable resource. We used to discuss this all the time in the laboratory I used to work at.
There have been smart asses talking about Peak Caol for 250 years. We are going towards going on 70 years of Peak Oil. There were widespread scares in the 70s about all kinds of metals running out because of 'Overpopulation' (another nonsense concept that people repeatly dig out. In the 60s there was a believe that fission materials was incredibly limited. In the 90s and 2000s there was an actual beleive that there were not enough 'rare earth' materials.
And we had for a long time a clear economic explaition why this happens. Its well understood but somehow the same ideas are repeated all the time.
And your example is horrifingly bad, because if we were talking about humans there would be a mountain of evidence that in fact humans are not important.
However in the whole history of the modern world we have never actually run out of a non-renewable resource. Even when supposedly the smartest people predicted it over and over and over and over again.
At some point this is just idiological bable unsupported by even the slightest amount of evidence and should be treated as such.
So what's your argument here? That it's impossible to run out of resources? Or that we don't need to worry because human's always have and always will innovate their way out of every problem?
It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it" - do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways out of things?
The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could happen.
Human innovation is just one kind of response, to the general trend. The real argument here is about the price, a finite resources that everybody understand to be running out would already raise in price long before any actual real limit is hit. The price system response to both on the supply and the demand side and importantly it doesn't respond in real time rather its actually predictive.
So if somebody says that something that is now available for essentially free, ie used to fill up balloons and children birthday parties you immediately know that it is nonsense.
With all of these arguments going back 200-300 years the people who make them never take a general higher level trend into account to make their argument.
> It seems extremely intellectually dishonest to go "just because something has never happened means it'll never happen and we don't need to worry about it" - do you think it's possible that we need these fears to innovate our ways out of things?
What I'm saying is that we should be intellectually honest and look at the actual trends and data we have historically for such claims and consult our models that we as humanity have developed to understand how these dynamic works.
This is what we do in basically every single situation but somehow when arguing about 'resources running out' we throw this out and are just willing to believe the same old nonsense arguments over and over again.
> The only reason the ozone layer is getting better is because people were made aware of the problem and did something about it - if we hadn't become aware of the issue it wouldn't have reversed by magic. We need to be aware of these things and work towards a solution - which means acknowledging they could happen.
That is a totally different problem. The Ozone was a externalize problem. Focusing on those kind of problems makes actual sense. That's my exact point, instead of inventing nonsense scaremongering problems about Peak-Whatever.
Helium production is a byproduct of natural gas production. If we're not running out of natural gas we're not running out of helium.
There are plenty of reasons to quit extracting natural gas, but that's a separate matter.