Huge Reserve Of Helium Found In East Africa's Rift Valley

Helium is popularly known as the gas used in filling party balloons. It is also has uses in the medical field like in MRI scans and for nuclear power. For years, many have feared that the amount of helium reserved in times of shortage may not be enough. However, British researchers have recently discovered a large reserve of the valuable gas in Tanzania which will offer hope for the future.

According to gizmodo.com, a group of researchers from Oxford and Durham universities along with the Norwegian helium exploration company Helium One, have found what they think is a large supply of the element in the most unexpected place.

Researchers said that the discovery was a result of a new approach in searching for helium that is a combination of exploration methods from the oil industry with scientific research. "We sampled helium gas (and nitrogen) just bubbling out of the ground in the Tanzanian East African Rift valley," Chris Ballentine, a geochemist in the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University, said in a statement.

The newly discovered gas field in Tanzania is believed to hold enough helium "to fill over 1.2 million medical MRI scanners," he said: "This is a game changer for the future security of society's helium needs, and similar finds in the future may not be far away."

One of the project leaders, geologist Jon Gluyas of Durham University, told Live Science that although the Tanzania gas field is large, it's only a small part of what the entire Rift Valley area may contain. "So it could be substantially larger," Gluyas said. "We will still have a lot of data to collect to be really confident, but yes, this is a globally significant discovery."

Dr. Gluyas said that one major factor to the development of the technique is to understand how helium gas is released from the rock where it forms. Most helium stays within the rock's crystal lattice. "You need a heating event to kick it out," he said. Volcanoes or other regions of magma in the earth can be enough to release the gas, he said.

As soon as helium is released, it has to be trapped by underground formations, which is generally the same kind of formation used to trap natural gas, The New York Times reported. It can also be found using the same kind of seismic studies done for oil and gas exploration. Since helium is mixed with other gases, it can be retrieved the same way natural gas is, by drilling a well.

Dr. Gluyas also said that the helium gas discovered in Tanzania may total to as much as 10 percent helium, which is a huge proportion compared to other sources. Researchers also believe that the source may have at least 54 billion cubic feet of the gas more than twice the amount currently in the Federal Helium Reserve, near Amarillo, Tex., which supplies about 40 percent of the helium used in the United States and is being drawn down.