Find the Helium
SARAH GONZALEZ, HOST:
Nick Snyder is devoting his life to this one element on the periodic table, helium. And it's kind of like a tribute to his great-uncle.
NICK SNYDER: His name was Charles Conrad. Everyone called him Pete.
GONZALEZ: His name was Charles Conrad, and everyone called him Pete?
SNYDER: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Uncle Pete was an astronaut. He walked on the moon - was the third person to walk on the moon. But he wasn't, like, serious, nerdy astronaut. Think daredevil prankster astronaut.
SNYDER: Yeah. His personal motto, I think a bit tongue-in-cheek, was if you can't be good, be colorful.
GONZALEZ: Like, as Uncle Pete walked down the ladder toward the moon, he made not a dramatic pronouncement, but a joke about being shorter than the other astronauts.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHARLES CONRAD: Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me.
GONZALEZ: Small step for Neil Armstrong, but a long one for me.
Uncle Pete is walking on the moon just like, dum de dum dum dum.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CONRAD: Dum de dum dum dum.
GONZALEZ: This is actual audio from the moon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CONRAD: Dum de dum dum dum. I can work out here all day. Take your time (laughter).
SNYDER: He did a lot of colorful things in his NASA career - quite a memorable character.
GONZALEZ: Because of his Uncle Pete, Nick grew up obsessed with everything about outer space. And this is what brings us to Nick's obsession with helium. You cannot send a rocket to space without helium. And a few years ago, Nick heard that the world is running short on helium.
SNYDER: And that is going to put at risk space exploration and access to space, which certainly was something, you know, near and dear to my great-uncle and my whole family.
GONZALEZ: Helium is crucial for way more than space. You need helium to run MRI machines, like, for doctors to detect cancer and tumors. You need helium to keep deep-sea divers safe. Electronic chips for our cellphones and computers - made using helium. So the helium shortage threatens all of that. Also, birthday parties - there are entire birthday parties and proms with droopy heliumless balloons because some party stores are out of helium.
So when Nick hears about the helium shortage, he thinks of his Great-Uncle Pete and all this other important helium stuff. And he decides he's going to go looking for more helium.
(SOUNDBITE OF SKINNY WILLIAMS AND TIMOTHY KVASNOSKY'S "BACK TO THE LAB")
GONZALEZ: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY from NPR. I'm Sarah Gonzalez. Today on the show, the helium shortage and how we got here. Helium is so special and so rare that the U.S. government once tried to buy up all the helium and hide it before anyone else in the world knew where helium was or what it could do. Also, we go exploring for new sources of helium with Nick. We've got our steel-toed boots on and a drill made of diamonds - kind of.
(SOUNDBITE OF SKINNY WILLIAMS AND TIMOTHY KVASNOSKY'S "BACK TO THE LAB")
GONZALEZ: The story of helium is largely a story of the U.S. government. It has a massive stockpile of helium. And one of the people in charge of that stockpile is Sam Burton.
What are your thoughts on balloons?
SAM BURTON: Party balloons?
GONZALEZ: Yeah, like, helium used for graduations and parties.
BURTON: I personally love party balloons. I think it's not a party without balloons, right? So I'm a big fan of party balloons.
GONZALEZ: And Sam loves helium.
BURTON: I like helium. I'm - it's my element.
GONZALEZ: It's your element.
BURTON: It's an amazing material. I've spent my whole life working with it. I'm quite the helium geek (laughter).
GONZALEZ: Sam says astronomers first identified helium in the sun in 1868. And as far as anybody knew, there was almost none of it on Earth - just the sun. But then in 1905, it was found on accident in Dexter, Kan., mixed up in the natural gas there. A couple of scientists discovered it.
BURTON: And they said, oh, my gosh, this is helium This is the same stuff that's on the sun.
GONZALEZ: This is the first time that anyone has found helium in any significant amount anywhere on Earth. So scientists bottle it up to start testing it. And they learned that helium is really light - like, so light it can lift things. Like, if you fill a balloon with helium, it will lift and float off.
But at that point, people already knew that hydrogen, this other gas, could lift things. People were using hydrogen ***
GONZALEZ: *** to lift blimps. This was before airplanes are really a thing. So blimps are a really big deal. Like, people are flying around in giant blimps.
But hydrogen blimps were dangerous. They were catching on fire because hydrogen is very, very flammable. Helium is not. Helium will not catch on fire.
BURTON: The military found that application very, very interesting.
GONZALEZ: The U.S. military thinks a lifting gas that doesn't burn would transform warfare in the air. So the government was like, hey, Dexter, Kan., we'd like to buy your helium.
BURTON: Yeah. And it was actually top-secret work. It was considered highly top-secret. How are we getting that helium gas?
GONZALEZ: The military saw so much potential in this helium that they decided to keep it to themselves.
BURTON: And, in fact, the German government approached the United States in requesting helium. And because it was a defense mineral, it was a strategic mineral, they said no.
GONZALEZ: We wouldn't give them our helium.
BURTON: We would not give them our helium. And how we got it was considered very, very, very hush-hush, too, so.
GONZALEZ: How did Germany know that we had helium then?
BURTON: Apparently somebody asked, where are you getting that from? Well, the Army's got it.
GONZALEZ: Spies?
(LAUGHTER)
GONZALEZ: Government researchers are using all these code words for helium, like he is lost. Send more pups from the same litter. That meant send more helium.
By the 1920s, the government is sending helium to the Army and the Navy in these big metal cylinders to fill up the first-ever super-safe helium blimps. They could attach bombs to these blimps, spy on enemies from the air.
But there's a problem. The helium kept leaking out of the cylinders, like, slowly over time.
BURTON: Helium is an escape artist. If there's a hole, helium will find it.
GONZALEZ: Sneaky little element.
BURTON: It absolutely is.
(LAUGHTER)
BURTON: If there's a leak, it'll get out.
GONZALEZ: Helium is one of the smallest, lightest things in the universe. It's so light and floaty that it's one of the only things that can escape Earth's gravitational pull. It will just float up and out into the universe, where helium is abundant. So if you try to trap helium in a cylinder, it will find a way out.
So we were just like, use it real quick because it disappears or it floats off into outer space?
BURTON: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: But eventually, this problem - helium leaks out of everything - turned out to be really useful for the space program. It's the height of the space race, and we want to make sure that Uncle Pete's spacesuit and his rocket don't have any leaks.
BURTON: Any leak in a rocket engine and it could explode.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, sounds bad.
The solution - test the suits with helium. If helium doesn't leak out, they're super sealed. And it's not just testing for leaks. You need helium to launch a rocket - like, to push an astronaut into space. So the U.S. starts to realize we need helium more than ever. It's a matter of national security. And this kicked off a series of government decisions and counter-decisions and counter-counter-decisions that led to today's helium shortage.
OK, we know helium is a natural gas, but a lot of it was just floating away. So in 1960, Congress passes a law to set up a national helium stockpile, the stockpile where Sam works today at the Bureau of Land Management. Congress says to the Sam of 1960, go to the U.S. Treasury and borrow the money you need to buy a ton of helium. Pay whatever you have to.
BURTON: So it's really a win-win. It's - to the natural gas producers, helium is kind of a waste product.
GONZALEZ: So, of course, natural gas companies start capturing their helium and selling tons of it to the government. And now America has to figure out how to store this sneaky gas that escapes from any container you put it in. And then someone goes, OK, hear me out. What if we put the helium back in the container it came from - like, underground?
They find a huge chunk of underground rock near Amarillo, Texas. It has these holes in it that helium likes to float into. It used to have a bunch of helium. And in 1960, the U.S. government starts injecting helium back into that rock.
BURTON: And they injected 32 billion cubic feet of helium. That's an awful lot of helium that they put into the ground for future use.
GONZALEZ: Like, how far down into the Earth are we talking here?
BURTON: It's 3,000, 3,200 feet down in the ground.
GONZALEZ: Where are the dinosaur bones? They're somewhere in there, right?
BURTON: (Laughter) Yep.
GONZALEZ: This is the only stockpile of helium anywhere in the world. Other countries have tried to trap helium and failed. So this stockpile - totally top-secret.
BURTON: It was like Cold War-type stuff to protect the field from prying eyes.
GONZALEZ: The government was hiding the helium in a field near Amarillo, Texas.
BURTON: Imagine a wide-open Texas prairie. There are slightly rolling hills. It's predominantly flat. First, you just see a big, open plain. You slide back this metal cover and look down, and there's a ladder that takes you down.
GONZALEZ: You're just, like, walking around the field like, oh, yeah, it's just a field - just an empty field. And then there's, like, a little door. And you open it.
BURTON: Yeah. And you open that door and you go, oh, look; there's a well cellar there, so it really is...
GONZALEZ: It's - one of the most important elements in the entire universe is just down here.
BURTON: There you go.
GONZALEZ: By 1973, there was so much helium under that rock that the government stopped injecting more. They thought they had enough for, like, a hundred years. They were wrong. By 1996, two decades later, the helium world had totally changed. Yes, Sam was ****
GONZALEZ: *** still selling government helium to the military and NASA and the weather people and science researchers. But now there's this whole big private helium industry, too - like, private companies selling helium to private companies to run MRI machines, blow up party balloons, whatever. So Congress is like, why the hell is the U.S. government in the helium business? Why are we maintaining this stockpile?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PORTER GOSS: This was a national security issue. It is no longer. And it cannot be justified as a jobs program, either. It needs to be put to rest. I yield back the balance of my time.
UNIDENTIFIED CONGRESSMAN: Gentleman's time has expired.
GONZALEZ: They introduce a bill to sell off all the government helium.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WAYNE ALLARD: Shutting down an inefficient facility, which has outlived its need and can't compete with the private sector.
GONZALEZ: Congress votes to get out of the helium business. They tell Sam, sell off all the helium you've got, not just to the government - to anyone who wants it. Sell it as fast as you can. It has nothing to do with the market, nothing to do with how much people are willing to pay for it. What could go wrong?
BURTON: I would say that we were doing it just for our own expenses.
GONZALEZ: And what Sam and his colleagues didn't realize was that they were flooding the market with cheap helium - so cheap that it wasn't worth it for private companies to try and find new helium anymore. Their low prices were killing the private helium industry. And by 2013, Congress was like, wait; our plan to turn helium over to private industry didn't work. There is no real private industry. We messed it up. So they gave Sam new orders.
BURTON: Congress said, you need to raise those prices.
GONZALEZ: Congress told Team Sam at the helium stockpile to increase the price of helium to encourage private industry to go looking for new sources. So now if people wanted to buy this rare, precious gas, they were going to have to fight for it. Sam and his colleagues start auctioning helium off to the highest bidder. And the price of helium went up...
BURTON: It raised up fairly quickly. It raised up to in the $60 to $70 range.
GONZALEZ: ...And up...
BURTON: During this time period, I think we were in the $80 range.
GONZALEZ: ...And up.
BURTON: And then the year after the auctions, it's up to 119.
GONZALEZ: Since Congress told Team Sam to start auctioning off the helium, the price has gone up from around $65 per thousand cubic feet to $119. Helium is more expensive than ever, and people are paying to get it. But the demand for helium is so high right now that Sam and the people at the helium stockpile literally cannot pull it out of the ground fast enough.
BURTON: We are delivering what we can as fast as we can.
GONZALEZ: And sometimes, it's not as much as they actually need?
BURTON: Well, there's more in the ground, but we can't give it more than what we can deliver it.
GONZALEZ: So they're rationing helium. Everyone gets just some of what they actually need, which is why some birthday parties have droopy balloons and why helium has become too expensive for some scientists to do their research. It's becoming scarce enough that some in the science community say the government should ban helium balloons, save it for more important uses.
But soon, it won't be up to the government at all anymore. The government has to get out of the helium business entirely by 2021 once and for all. That's what the last helium law requires. And they're not just selling off the last of the helium trapped in the rock at the highest price they can. They're, like, selling the field with the hidden door, selling the building.
So all the nuts and bolts and pipes and rock?
BURTON: Yup. Yup. Yup, computers, desks - all that stuff - September 30 of 2021.
GONZALEZ: Are you going to take, like, a little bit of helium with you?
BURTON: (Laughter) No, I probably better not do that.
GONZALEZ: Just a little bit.
BURTON: No, I better not do that.
GONZALEZ: No? OK.
And now that Sam and the government are getting out, people like Nick Snyder, the guy whose Great-Uncle Pete walked on the moon, are getting in. In 2013, the year Congress said helium has to get more expensive, Nick started a company that year. He called it North American Helium.
SNYDER: Means we drill holes in the ground looking for new sources of helium in North America.
GONZALEZ: And I invited myself along to Saskatchewan, Canada.
This is what they call the Prairies - right? - of Canada.
SNYDER: Very much so (laughter), for a long time in both directions. They find a lot of the dinosaur fossils down here.
GONZALEZ: Call me Indiana Jones, guys.
OK, if you want to find new helium like Nick, here's what you do. Step one - find a place where there once was helium and go back and see if there's more. You're not just going to drill holes a mile and a half into the Earth if you don't at least have some suspicion that there might be helium there.
SNYDER: We have specifically promised our investors that we are not going to do that.
GONZALEZ: Nick and I are going to a field where, in the 1960s, people drilling for oil stumbled onto helium. And Nick's going to see if there's maybe any more left down there.
Step two - get the rights to suck the helium out of the ground. Nick doesn't just get to own whatever helium he finds. He has to go through the Canadian government. And his deal with them - invest tens of millions of dollars, keep all the helium you can find on 1.8 million acres of Canadian Prairies, minus royalties.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR DOOR CLOSING)
GONZALEZ: Step three - rent a rig, hire a crew.
Just a short 14 hours later - yeah, it's not an easy trip.
SNYDER: No, it is not.
(LAUGHTER)
GONZALEZ: When we get to this rig, they give me some coveralls, goggles, tighten up my hard hat.
(SOUNDBITE OF HELMET STRAPS SCRATCHING)
GONZALEZ: I've got my steel-toed boots on, feeling particularly powerful. Let's go punch some holes in the ground and look for some helium.
An entire crew comes with me up on the rig. We walk up some stairs to this metal platform.
It's called your what house? ***********
BRUCE SHEBLEBINE: *** Doghouse. Everybody hangs out in the doghouse.
GONZALEZ: The doghouse - basically, a trailer up on the rig. Apparently, that's where you want to be on a rig.
UNIDENTIFIED WELL SUPERVISOR: And the two guys on the floor running the wrenches, the tongs are the roughnecks.
GONZALEZ: There's the doghouse, the roughnecks.
SHEBLEBINE: Yeah. There's lots of cool names. That's for sure.
GONZALEZ: And this guy - he has the coolest name. He is the mud man, official title. It's on his trailer. Bruce Sheblebine (ph), mud man.
SHEBLEBINE: My mom told me years ago to stay - quit playing in the mud, and I never listened to her. I'm still doing it.
GONZALEZ: The mud man is essential for Step four - drill a hole. There is a drill that slowly breaks into the Earth over several days through millions of years of rock. It's like a metal ball, smaller than a volleyball.
This thing can drill holes into the rock? It's not even sharp.
SHEBLEBINE: It'll drill a mile.
GONZALEZ: This drill has these little knobs of diamond all over it for strength.
SHEBLEBINE: It wouldn't look good on your finger, but...
GONZALEZ: Oh, my God. I can't lift it.
If you turn this small, heavy diamond drill over, there are these little jets on the bottom that shoot out a special kind of mud that the mud man makes.
It looks, like, smooth and silky. Like, it looks creamy.
SHEBLEBINE: It is. And if you'd stick your hands in it, it's very slippery, probably good for your skin.
GONZALEZ: This cold, slippery mud shoots out of the drill as it's smashing through the rock. It's like a pressure washer. And the mud sends rock shavings shooting up to the surface. Every 15 minutes, a geologist looks at those rock shavings. Those rock crumbs will tell them when they've hit the rock they're looking for, the rock with all the holes in it where helium likes to live. You do not want to drill past the rock you want because drilling is expensive. Nick is spending $50,000 a day on drilling.
SHEBLEBINE: That's the cutting sample that you're...
GONZALEZ: This is what you give to the geologist?
SHEBLEBINE: Yes, very, very old rock.
GONZALEZ: You think there's, like, dinosaur fossils mixed into this? Yes?
SHEBLEBINE: Oh, yeah.
GONZALEZ: The deeper you drill, the farther back in time you go. They have drilled way past the Jurassic period, like 855 million years past where the dinosaur fossils are. And after 11 days of drilling here, they hit what they were looking for.
MARLON MCDOUGALL: We saw the zone of interest. We saw the rock properties that we were looking for.
GONZALEZ: So you just saw, like, oh, this is the kind of rock we like. This means there could be helium in there.
MCDOUGALL: That's correct, yup.
GONZALEZ: That is Marlon McDougall. He works with Nick. And the final step, step five, is to build a plant to separate the helium from all the other things it's mixed in with. They're doing that two hours away from here. Nick and Marlon take me to see it.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
MCDOUGALL: Welcome to Battle Creek. This will be the next producing helium plant in Saskatchewan. You're looking at it right there.
GONZALEZ: What am I looking at?
MCDOUGALL: You're looking at a farmer's field right now, but that's where the plant's going to start being built within a year.
GONZALEZ: It's one man with a giant balloon. No, it's not (laughter).
SNYDER: Don't forget. You need a ride back.
MCDOUGALL: Yeah, exactly.
GONZALEZ: The only thing we can see is grass. But off in the distance, there's this little dot. That's the thing helium will flow out of.
MCDOUGALL: You can see a little red.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. It's kind of like a rusty red color.
MCDOUGALL: That's called the wellhead.
GONZALEZ: Faucet - it looks like a faucet.
MCDOUGALL: Sure. That works, faucet. And so you turn it on, and it would flow helium right now.
GONZALEZ: Like, would it shoot up?
MCDOUGALL: Yup.
GONZALEZ: Like (imitating gas escaping)?
MCDOUGALL: Much louder and much more force.
GONZALEZ: Like (imitating gas escaping under higher pressure).
MCDOUGALL: Like a jet engine.
GONZALEZ: Would it, like, shoot me out?
MCDOUGALL: Yes, it would.
GONZALEZ: Oh, it would shoot me. OK.
MCDOUGALL: It would kill you.
GONZALEZ: Oh, it would kill me. OK, good to know.
This plant will be ready to start selling helium in 2021, just in time to step in as the U.S. government steps out.
If you want to see videos of us drilling for helium and pictures of billion-year-old rock that may or may not have pterodactyl bones in it, go to our Instagram, @planetmoney.
Oh, my God. There's a Party City right by my hotel.
Today's show was produced by Liza Yeager and Cynthia Betubiza.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR DOOR CLOSING)
GONZALEZ: Alex Goldmark is our supervising producer, and Jacob Goldstein edited the show.
Party City. Do you guys have, like, a maple leaf balloon or anything that would be, like, extra Canadian? Oh, there's a Canada Day balloon. Perfect.
(SOUNDBITE OF BALLOON INFLATION)
UNIDENTIFIED PARTY CITY EMPLOYEE: Here you go.
GONZALEZ: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED PARTY CITY EMPLOYEE: You're quite welcome.
GONZALEZ: One Canada Day balloon. I mean, I obviously have to do this. (Inhales helium) I'm Sarah Gonzalez. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. Aw, man. Now I feel guilty.
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