We Are Experiencing a Helium Shortage — What This Could Mean for an “Irreplaceable” Element

Helium is one of those chemical elements we’ve all heard of, but most of us only know it for its most trivial uses. It’s great for birthday balloons, keeps Thanksgiving parade blimps and inflatables aloft, and has allowed countless pranksters to amuse their friends with comically high-pitched voices. (Which, moreover, Discover do not recommend.)

But helium is a serious gas with important applications, including in medical care and scientific research of all kinds. It is also rare on Earth, which is a problem in many ways.

Based on the current economic situation and available technology, a mere fraction of Earth’s helium – approximately 40 billion cubic meters – is available for practical extraction and use. That may seem like a lot, but many estimates suggest that unless we find new sources or develop as-yet-unknown technology to efficiently extract the gas from Earth, our available helium reserves could be exhausted within as little as a century.

If this happens, many areas of scientific research will be devastated, or at least made prohibitive.

Another problem with helium’s scarcity is that it lacks a practical substitute in the periodic table. On the one hand, helium has the lowest boiling point of all known substances, making it virtually unique in applications such as MRI machines, whose operation depends on the ultra-cold cooling of magnets. This same cooling capacity makes helium essential in other research devices, including the Large Hadron Collider.

“It’s been called irreplaceable because it can do things that many other elements can’t do,” said Mark Jones, a Michigan-based chemist and science communicator. Discover.

If helium is so abundant, why is it rare?

It is particularly ironic that helium (He) is one of the most common chemical elements in the universe, second only to hydrogen. Our own sun reflects this fact, since its elemental composition is approximately 75 percent hydrogen and 25 percent helium. (It should be noted that the name “helium” is itself derived from “Helios”, the Greek word for our sun.)

But the sun is 93 million miles away and here on Earth, helium is relatively rare. This is because all of Earth’s helium deposits are trapped inside the planet itself and are somewhat difficult to extract.

“Although helium is abundant elsewhere in the universe and in our own solar system, on Earth it comes from radioactive decay, primarily of uranium and thorium,” Jones said. “And even then, we can’t really extract helium directly from the ground. We mainly get it as a component of natural gas extraction.”

There is a lot of helium on Earth, or more precisely, In the Earth. According to some estimates, our planet contains up to 470 trillion cubic meters of helium. But most of these phenomena are incredibly diffuse across the planet’s substrates.

Learn more: The origin of terrestrial helium

Helium is in a class of its own

Helium is also one of the so-called rare gases, which, as you may remember from chemistry class, means that it is nonflammable and unreactive with other materials, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management. This makes it an eminently safe and stable element used in the creation of high-tech components ranging from optical fibers to semiconductors to the chips currently used to build and power artificial intelligence systems.

The next closest substitute – and it’s really not that close – would be hydrogen. Sure, it can be supercooled and has the advantage of being lighter than helium, but it can’t compete with helium in many other ways. By the way, you would Never I don’t want to hold a candle near hydrogen at all, as it is incredibly flammable, as is any surviving passenger of the Hindenburg I could have told you that in 1937.

So, helium is pretty much in a class of its own, and significant quantities of this element are currently only available in a few places on Earth, including: the United States, Qatar, and Russia, according to the American Chemical Society. But even these resources are strained or limited for a number of reasons, according to a study published in Petroleum science.

The United States, for example, once maintained a federal reserve of helium for national use, much like gold. But in 2024, the country decided to sell this reserve to private interests and must now pay the market price for this precious gas, like everyone else. And the price and scarcity of helium are only increasing, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management.

How science seeks to reuse helium

For now, helium is worth the trouble and increasing expense we must incur to extract, supply and use it. And many research and medical institutions have begun implementing ways to capture and reuse helium on a small scale.

Larger-scale efforts to capture helium escaping from Earth – and helium is literally light enough that it can and does float in space – would require a level of technology that we simply cannot master at present.

Until we are ready to invest heavily in researching such technology, humans will have to do their best to conserve this incredibly precious and precious resource. Think about that the next time you go shopping for party balloons.

Learn more: 10 things you didn’t know about the periodic table

Article sources

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