Preface.

Attention all you capitalists who think we can grow forever on a finite planet. Stuff can run out! Helium is the only element on earth that is completely nonrenewable.  

A supply crisis is expected by 2060 (Hu 2025). Commercial helium is commonly found in association with natural gas, which is also finite. Only a handful of gas fields in the United States possess commercial value for helium extraction.

Helium has only 30-200 years of reserves, with 90 % concentrated in four countries: 34% in Russia, 25% in Qatar, 18% in the United States, and 1% in Algeria. Meanwhile, you can still get party balloons filled with helium!  Well if it is running, party on, though when you see the industries it is essential for — well, I just hope you never need an MRI. And we can all agree we’re on the computer and watch TV too much, so when helium is gone, there go the optical fibers – the backbone of the internet, telephone systems, computer networks, cable TV.

Helium prices have reached unprecedented levels in 2025, rocketing up 400% in recent years due to fundamental supply-demand imbalances.

 

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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How Helium is used

Scientists are worried. Helium is the workhorse of chemistry, and shortages are forcing some experiments to shut down.  There is no substitute, or way to synthesize it, though some can be extracted as a byproduct of natural gas.

At the rate we’re consuming helium, it will be gone in less than 200 years, or even sooner since the current administration plans to privatize the federal helium supply, hastening its depletion. We’re undoing the planets billions of years of helium production in just a few decades.

Helium is the only element on earth that is completely nonrenewable. It is generated deep beneath the surface from radioactive uranium and thorium. Some of it seeps up and gets trapped in pockets of finite natural gas where it can be extracted, but most escapes into the air and heads for outer space (Brumfiel 2019).

And several of the new small nuclear reactors, such as X-Energy and Terrapower, plan to cool them down with liquid helium (Zogopoulis 2020).

How the universes second most common element could have a shortage is bewildering, but that’s because when an underground field is discovered, it’s hard to trap and store, usually escaping.  It’s hard to stockpile helium because of its inevitable escape from most containers.  The best way to keep that from happening is to store it in a layer of dolomite over 3,000 feet below ground, where there’s a thick layer of salt keeping it in place.

There are very few locations it’s likely to be found, mainly the U.S. Qatar, and Algeria. 

It takes hundreds of millions of years to produce any substantial quantities of helium underground. They build up where veins of these elements have been deposited, and lead to enormous underground reservoirs of helium. Once it’s extracted, we’d have to wait hundreds of millions of years again for these stores to replenish themselves.

Helium has no known substitutes in these technologies: 

• Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), endoscopes
• Nuclear magnetic resonance
• Deep sea diving
• Airbags

• helium plays an irreplaceable role, particularly in cryogenics. Its contributions have led to significant advancements in basic science and various fields, thus resulting in the awarding of numerous Nobel prizes for breakthroughs in superconductivity, superfluidity, and quantum mechanics. 

• Optical fiber communications 
• Super-conducting magnets
• Development of pharmaceutical drugs
• NASA to separate fuels in rockets
• Radiation-detecting sensors
• Particle accelerators
• Coldest substance in the world: minus 450 F, useful for cooling applications
• Quantum computers

• Electronics and semiconductor manufacturing are rapidly expanding using helium’s inert properties and cooling capabilities. It is essential for advanced chip production, especially as semiconductor processes become more complex. 

• Emerging applications include data center cooling for AI infrastructure and computing facilities, which increasingly require helium for specialized cooling applications.

• Helium-3 possesses unique characteristics at low temperatures, which makes it the sole known essential working medium for conducting experiments that require extremely low temperature cooling. Combining helium-3 with helium-4 leads to the creation of a mixture that can achieve temperatures that are a few tens of milli Kelvin (mK) above absolute zero, which is also the operating temperature range for quantum computers. At temperatures below 2.5 mK, helium-3 exhibits superfluidity.

• small nuclear reactors using liquid helium to stay cool 

References

Baig, E., et al. 2019. Not just balloons: helium shortage may deflat MRIs, airbags, and research

Brumfiel G (2019) The World Is Constantly Running Out Of Helium. Here’s Why It Matters. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775554343/the-world-is-constantly-running-out-of-helium-heres-why-it-matters

Hu Z (2025) A review of helium resources and development. Natural Gas Industry B

Murphy, H. 2019. The global helium shortage is real, but don’t blame party balloons. New York Times

Pflum, M. 2019. Not just party city: why helium shortages worry scientists and researchers. CBS News.

Siegel, E., et al. 2019. Humanity is thoughtlessly wasting an essential, non-renewable resource: Helium. Forbes.

Zogopoulis E (2020) Helium: fuelling the future? Energy Industry Review.