alt Hacker NewsHelium is only 5ppm in the atmosphere. Extracting useful quantities of it that way will probably never be economically viable. In other words, if for some reason we can no longer get helium from natural gas wells then it will be cheaper to just let patients die instead of doing cryogenic distillation of helium from the atmosphere to run MRI machines.
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XorNot • yesterday at 10:09 PM
In a world of extremely cheap solar electricity pushing grid prices negative, a lot of things might be a lot more economical then conventionally thought though - particularly when you factor in the desire to get a full return on industrial manufacturing of panels.
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We are already separating out the majority elements from air via ASU plants, so we should compare the abundance of helium in what is left from typical extraction. And that looks quite technically viable, if obviously uneconomic at present.