alt Hacker News<10% of natural gas plants recover helium. All of them extract it. The remaining >90% vent it into the atmosphere. This is an engineering / money problem, not a physics problem.
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kakacik • today at 8:28 PM
As usual - 'there is scarcity of XYZ' -> price it accordingly, and markets will align quickly. Dont expecr private companies to have long term thinking, thats not how bonuses for those steering the wheel are set up.
It becomes a larger problem as the world moves away from fossil fuels like natural gas.
I'm not a chemist but are there really no alternatives? Running fusion plants to make helium seems very unlikely to become cost effective, but it would be quite the sci-fi future if we filled party balloons by bombarding hydrogen with free protons.
I guess there aren't any easy molecules to break apart to get helium either since its a noble gas. No hydrolyses type solutions because there aren't any molecules that incorporate helium. I guess radioactive decay, but even that is ultimately limited over long enough timescales.