Re:Will We Run Out of Helium?
by faeyanpiraat on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @05:19AM
(#21812260)
If we mine the same amount of gas, and discard the natural gas part, then shouldn't the price of helium go up?
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Re:Will We Run Out of Helium?
by reportgunner on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @06:16AM
(#21812515)
Sorry, but how does one discard natural gas ?
Re:Will We Run Out of Helium?
by semi-extrinsic on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @09:17AM
(#21813620)
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.
I would simply collect the helium (e.g. in a net, or tupperware box) and discard that which is not helium or place it carefully back where I found it
see [Wikipedia: Gas flare](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare)
Why not just continue using it for heating/cooking/whatever then...
Isn’t burning lots of fossil fuels putting us in a bit of a pickle?
Yeah, but it's better than flaring it.
The other comment about reinjection makes way more sense, though.
Re:Will We Run Out of Helium?
by de_watcher on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @07:23AM
(#21812777)
Put it in a yellow bin.
Re:Will We Run Out of Helium?
by SlowRobotAhead on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @07:09AM
(#21812722)
Why would the natural gas be discarded? It would be available and priced like helium is now. Someone would use it.
It’s not like a safe storage, efficient, fairly clean source of energy is ever going to be worthless.
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.
Edit: citation. It’s called “flaring”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare#Impacts_of_waste_fla...