[ColdStream]

It is the four layers of resources, each one is smaller than the next.

1. What is the total theoretical resource?

2. How much of it do we actually now the location of

3. How much is technically recoverable?

4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable?

The last one is really the crux of the problem nowadays, there is a lot of helium but most of it just isn't in a high enough quantity to make the investment to built processing for it. Thus most of it just float off into space.

There will come a point when the price hits high enough to justify the cost but that also means higher costs to the end user.

[tw04]

> 4. And most importantly, how much is economically viable?

But literally the least important factor beyond “should we have started yesterday”. The amount of waste humanity has perpetuated in just the last 100 years because something wasn’t “economically viable” this fiscal quarter makes my head hurt.

[automatic6131]

Doing economically inviable things is waste. It's pumping resources into something worth less than the sum of its inputs.

Apropos of nothing, see one trillion dollars into datacenters.

[tw04]

Which is why they pumped fracking waste water into deep aquifers, because it wasn’t “economically viable” to pull that water out of the ground. Fast forward a decade and people are up in arms that those fresh water aquifers are no longer viable sources of drinking water, wondering how anyone could have been so short sighted.

Just because something isn’t economically viable today doesn’t mean it never will be. That short term thinking is exactly why China is absolutely decimating the US in renewable energy.

[automatic6131]

That's a different matter, that's an unpriced externality, were the oil company required to pay to sort the water out didn't choose because they weren't forced to.

So the oil should be economically unviable but due to poor regulation, they were able to extract it.

[tw04]

That’s just a cop out. There are externalities to everything and they are never completely accounted for. So by definition only looking at “economic viability” is a failed experiment as I posited from the get go.

We make decisions based on objective reality, not a perfect theory in a lab.

[actionfromafar]

That is exactly it - how do we define economically inviable? There are many answers, very different.

[westurner]

Total cost estimates should included unassessed environmental hazard, carbon, energy mix

[onion2k]

There will come a point when the price hits high enough to justify the cost but that also means higher costs to the end user.

This makes me wonder if it'd be worthwhile starting a company to capture it now, and just stockpile it until it's rare enough to be able to use my stockpile to control the price. The DeBeers diamonds playbook applied to helium, or maybe the Peter Thiel build-a-monopoly-to-win approach.

[dreamcompiler]

This is both a bad and a good idea.

First the bad: Helium is very expensive to extract and store. You'd need a lot of venture capital. And you'd have a tough time competing with Qatar which produces between 1/4 and 1/3 of the world's supply. Qatar already is the DeBeers of helium.

The good: When the US/Iran war started helium prices shot up, so there might be an opportunity for a helium supplier not dependent on the Strait of Hormuz.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/helium-prices-soar-q...

[westurner]

A teal Hydrogen company that splits Methane (CH4) into Hydrogen (H) and Oxidized Carbon Nanotubes (O-CNT) would be significantly more profitable than one that splits into Hydrogen and Carbon Black. (Because after production costs, O-CNT have a significantly higher market price than carbon black.)

But do our communities want fracking wastewater in our aquifer groundwater or on our farm fields?

When is the break-even point for cracking Helium from natural gas at current and predicted Helium market prices?

[westurner]

teal hydrogen: electrolytic catalysis, renewable feedstocks

turquoise hydrogen: high-temp pyrolysis of methane

So e.g. [1] is turquoise hydrogen.

[1] "Production of hydrogen and carbon nanotubes from methane using a multi-pass floating catalyst chemical vapour deposition reactor with process gas recycling" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-025-01925-3

A renewable feedstock process that yields Hydrogen and O-CNT would be yielding teal hydrogen.

A natural gas process that yields Hydrogen and O-CNT would be yielding turquoise hydrogen.

[fragmede]

That's where the government reguli could step in. It wasn't economically viable to capture natural gas so it's just flared off, but if the government fines oil companies for flaring off the natural gas, suddenly it's economically viable to capture it instead of wasting it.

[westurner]

It's economical to capture and sell the Helium out of natural gas even without a flaring penalty to encourage to be efficient with heat and material outputs.

It's also already economical to make Hydrogen and Carbon-based products like Graphene and spec Oxidized Carbon Nanotubes from natural gas.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946629

And, it's surely also profitable to make more He3, He4, and T with a fusion reactor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946533

[jstanley]

> if the government fines oil companies for flaring off the natural gas, suddenly it's economically viable to capture it instead of wasting it.

If the government fines individuals for not digging holes in their back garden every day then suddenly it's economically viable to dig holes in your back garden every day, but it doesn't mean it's overall productive.