How much to produce He.........?10 Feb 2024 14:16
Make?
Yes, very hard. You need a nuclear reactor to do so.
Helium is an element, so to produce it, you either need larger atoms to undergo nuclear decay and produce it as a byproduct, or hydrogen atoms to fuse together. Either way, a ton of energy would be produced, but only a small amount of helium. Producing useful amounts of helium by either process is unlikely in the forseeable future.
Lucky for us, some of those nuclear reactions happen naturally, within the crust of the earth, and have for untold millions of years. Over that timescale, those comparative trickles of helium make for pretty large amounts. Most of that just leaked into the atmosphere, and most of that escaped into space. But some of it got trapped in deposits in the rocks.
Now, deposits of helium are never pure. In fact, at best, they’re only a few percent of the gasses in there. Helium separation started when a series of natural gas deposits along the Oklahoma-Texas border turned out to have unusually high helium concentrations (something like 8%). That was enough to create problems, so they built facilities to separate the helium and throw it away. Over time, they realized that helium had some useful properties, and it began to be used for a number of purposes. Eventually, they started deliberately looking for gas deposits with high helium concentrations, so they could produce more helium. Then, in 1925, the US government created a strategic reserve of helium, because it was believed that the helium supply was potentially important for national security. The reserve has since been privatized.
The point, though, is that helium is effectively a non-renewable natural resources. How expensive it is has something to do with how expensive it is to extract, but also with availability of the resource itself, which is often beyond our control.
The process for separating helium from natural gas is a well-established industrial process. Not something the average person could do in their kitchen, but hardly outside the norm of large-scale manufacturing. Finding helium, on the other hand, is rather trickier.
All the best (ours is free from hyfrocarbons don't forget........! :()
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