[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.