Selling the Nation's Helium Reserve

Questions? Call 800-624-6242

About | Ordering | New

LoginRegister

| Items in cart [0]

PAPERBACK
price:$34.25
add to cart

Rights & Permissions

Free PDF Access

Free Resources

Related Titles

Selling the Nation's Helium Reserve (2010)
Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA)

Citation Manager Export the bibliographic data for this book in your chosen format
Web Search Builder Use this book's key terms to search within this book, across our collection, or across the Web.
Skim This Chapter Skim this chapter and use this chapter's key terms to search within this book.
Reference Finder Paste in your own text to find books that relate to your topic.

Citation Manager

. "4 Helium Sourcing and Reserves." Selling the Nation's Helium Reserve. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2010.

Please select a format:

Page
73


E-mail Share on facebook Facebook Share on delicious Delicious Share on stumbleupon Stumble Share on twitter Twitter More Sharing ServicesMore

The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.

Selling the Nation’s Helium Reserve

TABLE 4.1 Estimates of Helium Reserves Worldwide, 2008 (billion cubic feet)

Country	Reserves^a	Reserve Base^a
United states	153	350^b
Algeria	64	300
Australia	NA	6.9^c
Canada	NA	72
China	—	40
Indonesia	NA	14^c
Poland	0.9	10
Qatar	360^d	360
Russia	60	250
Other countries	NA	8.1
Total	638^d	1,410
NOTE: NA means not applicable, as the country has no refining capacity. ^aEntries are those from USGS, 2009, unless otherwise specified and are current estimates based on available information. They are not certified by any accrediting institution. ^bIncludes measured and probable reserves rather than measured and indicated, as for other countries. ^cConservative estimates based on planned liquid helium plant capacity (see discussion in text) and a 25-year minimum plant productive life. ^dAccording to information compiled by the DOE’s Energy Information Administration, as discussed in the text.

tries, the aggregate effective reserves for their fields would be substantially less than the reserves shown in Table 4.1. In the one case outside the United States where information was available, this determination decreased the effective reserves of that country by as much as 70 percent.⁴ The information necessary to make such estimates is generally not publicly available, but it can be stated that in the United States such losses in reserves—that is, losses due to bypassing—though not negligible, are much less severe than in Qatar.

United States

The United States has reserves of approximately 153 Bcf and a reserve base of 350 Bcf. Table 4.2 details the amount of reserves for all principal fields in the United States currently believed to contain economically accessible concentrations of

⁴

The country in question, Qatar, produced approximately 2,200 Bcf of natural gas in 2007, most of it from the North Field (U.S. Energy Information Administration-Qatar, 2009). Based on an estimated helium concentration of 0.04 percent by volume in the North Field (Daly, 2005), 880 MMcf of helium were produced by Qatar during 2007. However, only 250 MMcf of helium are reported to have been refined over that time period (USGS, 2009), indicating that only about 30 percent of the natural gas from the field was processed for helium, which corresponds to a waste factor of 70 percent.