SUSM PhD student Ankesh Siddhantakar is receiving a high level of interest regarding his research on the sustainability of helium resource.
Ankesh has been utilizing tools in sustainability management, specifically industrial ecology, to analyze environmental and resource aspects of the noble gas. He's done a geopolitical risk analysis which looked at the supply risk of helium going into MRI machines. A material flowing analysis has just been completed and presented at a conference in Italy, where he quantified the global supply and flows through the economy. Next is looking at the environmental impacts of helium using bicycle assessment.
He has recently been interviewed and quoted in MIT Technology Review.
“At the end of the day, what’s happening is helium’s just getting more expensive,” says Ankesh Siddhantakar, a PhD student in sustainability management at the University of Waterloo in Canada. “The era of cheap helium is probably gone.”
Given its importance to so many industries, Siddhantakar thinks helium should be a higher priority for those thinking about managing strategic resources. In a recent analysis, he found that the global supply chains for helium, lithium, and magnesium face similar risks.
“It is a key enabler for critical applications, and that’s one of the pieces that I think need to be more understood and appreciated,” Siddhantakar says.
Another challenge is that helium atoms are so light Earth’s gravity can’t hold onto them. They tend to just, well, float away, even escaping specially designed tanks. Up to 50% of helium we extract is lost before it can be used, according to a new analysis presented by Siddhantakar last week at the International Round Table on Materials Criticality.