You know that old adage, "What goes up, must continue on into the atmosphere to be lost forever unless you buy a bunch of equipment to trap and store it under Texas?"
Well, so did the U.S. Congress of 1925. Except that unlike you lazy louts, they actually did something about it by establishing the Federal Helium Reserve.
Now, helium is not a terribly scarce resource, so reports that we're "running out" of the stuff are somewhat specious. You know, like global warming. (Just kidding, that actually is a thing.)
But helium is nonrenewable and, while not so useful for keeping a bunch of giant plane-killing balloons floating off the coast of Rhode Island anymore, it is indispensable in all sorts of commercial, industrial and medical fields, notably MRI machines.
"You've heard of liquid nitrogen? Well, liquid helium is lots colder," according to Widener University chemistry professor Scott Van Bramer. "Lots" is the technical term, by the way. I checked.
Turns out, helium is a heck of a lot more than an inert floaty-type filling for balloons. It also has the lowest boiling point of any known substance and doesn't even become a liquid until it gets to -452.2 degrees Fahrenheit, which, for those keeping core at home, is damn near absolute zero.
Van Bramer uses the stuff to cool superconductors in a nuclear magnetic resonance machine that allows him to study molecular structures. Apparently, there is no substitute. Nothing else even comes close.
"If something happened and we couldn't get liquid helium when we needed it, then this quarter-million-dollar instrument would be worthless and it would cost us $20,000 to get it started up again," he said. "So it's a bigger deal than just party balloons."
To keep the NMR running, Widener pays between $700 and $1,000 for 60 liters of liquid helium a couple times a year. While that price has steadily been increasing over the years, there haven't been any notable shocks recently.
But that is likely about to change.
Here's what's going on: Helium is found in the same areas as petroleum, so any time a hole is poked in the earth to get at the oil, guess what escapes like air out of a balloon? To combat this waste (and to ensure it didn't fall behind in cutting-edge blimp technology) the U.S. government established the National Helium Reserve, incurring $1.3 trillion in debt in the process. The resultant stockpile is currently estimated to contain 153.2 billion cubic feet and supplies a fair chunk of domestic and global demand at below-market prices.
Bills to end the program pop up from time to time, but never get much traction. Current law, however, requires the government to sell off its remaining stores this year to repay the debt owed to the U.S. Treasury for creating the reserve.
Rather than simply write a new law that says, "Hey, why don't we just not do that?" (you know, like the one they apparently passed about not prosecuting systemic bank fraud) legislators now appear willing to do away with the reserve through a staggered auction process that would bring prices in line with the private market over several years.
Having somehow managed to stop squabbling like a pack of drunk ferrets for five minutes, the House sent a bill off to the Senate this month proposing that the sell-down stop when it hits a few billion cubic feet, which would then only be available for federal uses. Like zeppelins, I guess.
No one knows yet what that will mean for the helium market, but I'm just gonna go ahead and guess that the days of getting helium on the cheap are drawing to a close.
"To me, the worst nightmare is not having reliable supplies," said Van Bramer. "I'm not happy if I have to pay more for it, but if I can't get it when I need it, then that's like a $20,000 problem. It's not like universities have that kind of spare change lying around. And the same thing is going to be true for every MRI imaging center."
Don't worry though, I'm sure these things won't become astronomically expensive and/or flat out denied for coverage by insurance companies. But hey, even if they do, I know for a fact that at least one of our senators has a great speech in the can on how totally awesome the free market is, so at least we'll have something to listen to while pondering how in the hell we're going to afford that potentially life-saving brain scan.