Nice article on the shortage of helium.

The era of cheap helium is over—and that's already causing problems | MIT Technology Review

that’s already causingproblems

Helium is crucial to all kinds of technologies, including MRI scannersand semiconductors. But it’s produced in only a few places.

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In the nuclear magnetic resonancefacility at Mississippi State University, three powerful magnets make itpossible to see how atoms form bonds. Chemists there use the technology todesign new polymers and study how bacteria bind to surfaces. To make it allwork, they need an element that’s commonly found in grocery stores, but is alsoin perpetually short supply: helium.

Every 12 weeks, the university pays$5,000 to $6,000 to replenish the liquid helium required to cool thesuperconducting wire coiled up inside the magnets down to -452 °F (-269°C).

“It’s by far the biggest expense wehave,” says Nicholas Fitzkee, the facility’s director. “The price that drives our user fees is the purchase of liquid helium, and that has pretty much doubled over the past year or so.”

Helium is excellent at conducting heat.And at temperatures close to absolute zero, at which most other materials wouldfreeze solid, helium remains a liquid. That makes it a perfect refrigerant foranything that must be kept very cold.

Liquid helium is therefore essential toany technology that uses superconducting magnets, including magnetic resonanceimaging (MRI) scanners and some fusionreactors. Helium also cools particle accelerators, quantum computers, and the infrared detectors on the James Webb Space Telescope. As a gas, helium whisks heat away from silicon to prevent damage in semiconductor fabs.

“It’s a critical element for thefuture,” says Richard Clarke, a UK-based helium resources consultant whoco-edited a book about the element. Indeed, the European Union includes helium on its 2023 list of critical raw materials, and Canada put it on a critical minerals list too.

Again and again throughout the historyof technology development, helium has played a critical role while remaining intight supply. As part of MITTechnology Review’s 125th anniversary series, we looked back at our coverage of how helium became such an important resource, and considered how demand might change in the future.

Countries have at times taken extrememeasures to secure a steady helium supply. In our June 1975 issue, which focused on critical materials, a Westinghouse engineer named H. Richard Howland wrote about a controversial US program that stockpiled helium for decades.

Even today, helium is not always easyto get. The world’s supply depends primarily on just three countries—the US,Qatar, and Algeria—and fewer than 15 companies worldwide.

With so few sources, the helium marketis particularly sensitive to disruptions—if a plant goes offline, or war breaksout, the element may suddenly be in short supply. And as Fitzkee noted, theprice of helium has climbed rapidly in recent years, putting hospitals andresearch groups in a pinch.

The global helium market hasexperienced four shortages since 2006, says PhilKornbluth, a helium consultant. And the price of helium has nearly doubled since 2020, from $7.57 per cubic meter to a historic high of $14 in 2023, according to the United States Geological Survey.

Some research labs, includingFitzkee’s, are now installing recycling systems for helium, and MRImanufacturers are making next-generation scanners that require less of it. Butmany of the world’s highest-tech industries—including computing and aerospace—willlikely need even more helium in the future.

“At the end of the day, what’shappening 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.”

A high-tech need

Helium is the second element on theperiodic table, which—as you may recall from high school chemistry class—meansit has just two protons (and thus two electrons).

Thanks to their simple structure,helium atoms are some of the smallest and lightest, second only to hydrogen.They’re extremely stable and don’t easily react with other stuff, which makesthem easy to incorporate into industrial or chemical processes.

One major use of liquid helium over theyears has been to cool the magnets inside MRI scanners, which help doctorsexamine organs, muscles, and blood vessels. But the cost of helium has risen somuch, and the supply has been so volatile, that hospitals are eager for otheroptions.

MRI manufacturers including Philips and GE HealthCare now sell scanners that require much less helium than previous generations. That should help, though it will take years to upgrade the roughly 50,000 MRI scanners already installed today.

Other industries are finding waysaround helium too. Welders have substituted argon or hydrogen on some jobs,while chemists have switched to hydrogen for gas chromatography, a process thatallows them to separate mixtures.

But there’s no good alternative tohelium for most applications, and the element is much harder to recycle whenit’s used as a gas. In semiconductor fabs, for example, helium gas removes heatfrom around the silicon to prevent damage and shields it from unwantedreactions.

With rising demand for computing drivenin part by AI, the US is investing heavily in building new fabs, which will likely drive more demand for helium. “There’s no question that chip manufacturing will be the biggest application within the coming years, if it isn’t already,” says Kornbluth.

Overall, Kornbluth says, the heliumindustry expects to see growth in the low single digits over the next fewyears.

Looking further out, Clarke predictsthat most industries will eventually phase out nonessential uses of helium.Instead, they will use it primarily for cryogenic cooling or in cases wherethere’s no alternative. That includes quantum computers, rockets, fiber-opticcables, semiconductor fabs, particle accelerators, and certain fusionreactors.

“It’s something that, for a costreason, all these new technologies have got to take into account,” Clarkesays.

Given its importance to so manyindustries, Siddhantakar thinks helium should be a higher priority for thosethinking 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 criticalapplications, and that’s one of the pieces that I think need to be moreunderstood and appreciated,” Siddhantakar says.

A delicate balance

The helium we use today formed from thebreakdown of radioactive materials millions of years ago and has been trappedin rocks below Earth’s surface ever since.

Helium is usually extracted from theseunderground reservoirs along with natural gas, as John Mattill explained in anarticle from our January 1986 issue: “Helium can be readily separated from the gas before combustion, but the lower the helium concentration, the higher the cost of doing so.”

Generally speaking, heliumconcentrations must be at least 0.3% for gas companies to bother with it. Such levels can be found in only a handful of countries including the US, Algeria, Canada, and South Africa. Qatar has lower concentrations but produces enough natural gas to justify recovering helium at those lower levels.

Helium shortages are not caused by alack of helium, then, but the inability of producers in those few countries todeliver it to customers everywhere in a timely manner. That can happen for anynumber of reasons.

“It is a very global business, and anytime a war breaks out somewhere, or anything like that, it tends to impact thehelium business,” says Kornbluth.

Another challenge is that helium atomsare 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 weextract is lost before it can be used, according to a new analysis presented bySiddhantakar last week at the International Round Table on Materials Criticality.

Given all this, countries that need alot of helium—Canada, China, Brazil, Germany, France, Japan, Mexico, SouthKorea, and the UK are among the top importers—must constantly work to ensure areliable supply. The US is one of the largest consumers of helium, but it’salso a leading producer.

For decades, the global helium marketwas closely tied to the US government, which began stockpiling helium in Texasin 1961 for military purposes. As Howland wrote in 1975, “The original justification of the federal helium conservation program was to store helium until a later time when it would be more essential and less available.”

But the US has slowly sold off much ofits stockpile and is now auctioning off the remainder, with a final salepending in the next few months. The consequences are not yet clear, though itseems likely that agencies such as NASA will have to pay more for helium in thefuture. As Christopher Thomas Freeburn wrote in a 1997 article titled “Save the Helium,” “By eliminating the reserve, the federal government … has placed itself at the mercies of the market.”

Customers everywhere are stilloverwhelmingly dependent on the US and Qatar, which together produce more than 75% of all helium the world uses. But the US has produced and exported significantly less in the past decade, while demand from US consumers rose by 40%, according to the USGS’s Robert Goodin.

Eager to fill the void, new countriesare now starting to produce helium, and a flurry of companies are exploringpotential projects around the world. Four helium plants opened last year inCanada, and one started up in South Africa.

In a 1938 article, MIT’s president argued thattechnical progress didn’t mean fewer jobs. He’s still right.

Russia is set to open a massive newplant that will soon supply helium to China, thereby edging out Algeria as theworld’s third-largest producer.

“Russia is going to become thenumber-three producer as early as 2025, and they’ll end up accounting for aquarter of the world’s supply within the next five years,” saysKornbluth.

Qatargas in Qatar is opening a fourthplant, which—together with Russia’s new facility—should expand global heliumsupply by about 50% in the next few years, he adds.

Some companies are now consideringsites where they could extract helium without treating it as a by-product ofnatural gas. Helium One is exploring several such sources in Tanzania.

Will it be enough?

Back in 1975, Howland described the helium market as “an example of the false starts, inefficiencies, and economic pitfalls we must avoid to wisely preserve our exhaustible resources.”

He also predicted the US would use upmuch of its known helium reserves by the turn of the century. But the US stillhas enough helium in natural-gas reservoirs to last 150 more years, according to a recent USGS analysis.

“As with a lot of other things, it’sgoing to be about the sustainable management of this resource,” saysSiddhantakar.