The Oil Drum

Some of the great things that make human live much easier are dependent on rare non-renewable resources. Helium is one of these, a noble gas with remarkable qualities due to its inert state. It is used for example to cool metals needed to create superconductivity. This process is applied in the medical industry to make Magnetic-Resonating-Image( MRI) scans, a technique to produce images of body tissue, making accurate diagnosis of health problems without surgery possible. But Helium is also applied in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopty (NMR), for the arc welding of various metals amongst which are titanium, magnesium and aluminium, to reduce high-pressure risk in deep-sea breathing systems, to purge and pressurize liquid-hydrogen rocket propulsion systems, to find leaks in pipelines, as a coolant in certain nuclear reactor types, possibly for superfluid gyroscopes and last and for me definetly the least, to let balloons float.

Can Helium be substituted? The answer is no for applications which need cooling below a temperature of minus 210 degrees centigrade since that is the temperature at which the next best thing, liquid nitrogen, freezes. Helium on the other hand only liquifies at minus 272 degrees centigrade and stays in that state even down to absolute zero. Making it the most precious element for cooling at very low temperatures. For MRI scanning this means the available substitutes can only offer much higher temperatures at which the scanner can operate, implying less conductivity and therefore a less effective scanner.

The availability of Helium is thus quite important as long as no substitutes for these processes have been developed. So how long will this resource last?