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Buy now: helium futures

Call me a visionary but it seems that I was three and a half years ahead of my time when I wrote this column back in early 2007.

Yes, how about that -- an early-warning of the pending helium shortage and the crisis that would follow, or so it would seem.

However, I suspect that was a slow news day and I was just looking for something (anything!) to write about. What's more, I wasn't the first to highlight this inevitable problem.

Indeed, there's a link in that column to an article published on the BBC website some two years prior.

But now it seems, the looming helium crisis is once again news de jour.

Perhaps it's another slow news week but now it appears that news of the looming helium shortage has started appearing in news publications all over the globe.

Everyone from Time to The Telegraph are pitching this tale of woe.

And in some cases, it appears that facts have become something of a casualty in this attempt by each publisher to usurp the rest.

Do we have 30 years worth of helium left or just 25 years for instance.

Wouldn't it be a real pain if we finally came up with a practical fusion reactor, only to find that it would run on nothing but helium and our entire planet's reserves of this ethereal gas had already been used in party balloons or in welding up the containment vessel?

Even without fusion, helium is still an important component of many fission reactors so we can't really afford to waste what little we have left -- can we?

Given its scarcity and the fact that we have no real cost/energy-effective way of making it ourselves, should we be carefully guarding what little we have left for these specialist and crucial applications?

Or are party balloons just as important?

Then again, perhaps this is all a bit of hype and a case of crying wolf.

However, I wonder if it's worth nipping down to The Warehouse and grabbing one of those little cylinders of helium they sell for inflating party balloons? If things are as bad as some claim, the $50 you spend today could be worth $500 in just two short decades.

Unfortunately I suspect that helium is not too different to hydrogen in being a very small molecule that can weave its way through the matrix of larger molecules (such as the steel containers in which it's stored) so that within a few years, your cannister would be empty anyway.

Whatever the case, I think I'll set an alarm in my diary to revisit the helium story in another five years time, but only if it's a slow-news day.

In the meantime, perhaps we ought to just put up with balloons that don't float away if you let go of the string -- or consider using hydrogen instead for such applications, since it's cheap and renewable. Just keep the balloons away from the candles on the birthday cake (Oh the humanity!).

Will you be buying into helium futures on the basis of these recent news stories?

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