Helium supplies are tight—and it could get worse

The war in Iran has taken almost a third of the world’s helium off the market, moving supply of the critical material from a surplus before the war to a shortage in some regions.

Early on in the conflict, analysts said the market could smoothly cope for roughly 2 weeks without the helium normally recovered from Qatar’s natural gas fields. Two and a half months later, helium users are dealing with reduced supply, surcharges and price hikes, and stiff competition to keep the noble gas on hand.

Attacks by Iran on QatarEnergy’s Ras Laffan natural gas complex damaged equipment that feeds the site’s liquid-helium lines, and the firm says repairs will take 3 to 5 years. Moreover, a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is stopping maritime traffic to and from Qatar, including any helium that might be in storage or sitting on trapped boats.

At a recent scientific meeting called PANIC (Practical Applications of NMR in Industry Conference), the presentations and posters were about the insights that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) can offer on real-world samples such as shampoo or geological core samples. The talk in the hallways, though, often turned to anxiety over keeping the instruments’ superconducting magnets cold when supplies of liquid helium get shaky.

Liquid helium maintains the magnets at the core of NMR and related instruments at around −269 °C. Every experiment injects heat into the system, boiling off a bit of helium. If the helium is in danger of running out, technicians can carefully shut the instrument down and let it warm up.

It’s not a step to be taken lightly. Even if the magnet survives being warmed up and then cooled back down later—never a guarantee—taking that drastic step consumes around $50,000 worth of helium, said Klas Meyer, an NMR scientist at Germany’s Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM).

Meyer said he and his colleagues have had to start choosing between keeping the research moving and keeping the magnets safe. Europe is highly dependent on Qatari helium, and the uncertainty is stressful. “We were supposed to get some helium next week,” Meyer said, “but we haven’t heard for sure.”

Jim DeFelippis, a senior scientist at the chemical maker Evonik Industries, said his firm’s Philadelphia research campus has so far been able to get its regular supply of liquid helium from Airgas, a subsidiary of Air Liquide, with just a logistics surcharge. DeFelippis said his and other research labs in the region have started placing orders much further ahead than normal to keep a buffer on hand.

Gas chromatography and some types of mass spectrometry also use helium, in the form of compressed gas packed in steel cylinder tanks, as an inert carrier gas. Despite coming from the same sources, cryogenic liquid helium and helium in gas cylinders move along somewhat different supply chains.

DeFelippis said his gas chromatography colleagues have had their supply of helium cylinders cut by 70%. That team is now moving about half of its instruments over to hydrogen as a carrier gas, a switch that requires a lot of work and method redevelopment but will ultimately insulate the lab from disruptions in helium supply, he said.

A typical NMR unit has 90 to 120 L of liquid helium inside, according to Timothy Bergeron, a technical sales manager at the NMR instrument maker JEOL. In this climate, users should plan to top it up when it’s half full, not when it’s 5 L from empty. “Don’t trust that little digital fill gauge to keep you safe,” Bergeron said.

Better yet, he’s advising his customers to order helium on a recurring schedule instead of waiting for the fill gauge on the instrument to get low. Instruments 4 years old or more need refilling every 6 to 12 months, depending on size and design, he said. The newer generations burn through less, he said, and helium recovery systems are getting better all the time.

Maura Garvey, an industrial gas consultant, says the impact that helium users are feeling from the loss of Qatari supplies depends a lot on where they buy their gas. Air Liquide is entirely dependent on Qatar for its helium, other than the volumes it has stored in a geological formation in Germany, she says, making it the supplier most exposed to the conflict.

Air Liquide says the loss of supply from Qatar had a limited impact on its first-quarter earnings. But at the firm’s annual meeting last week, CEO François Jackow said, “There’s a tension on this market, which was in excess capacity and is now in deficit.” Citing medical imaging, semiconductors, fiber optics, and the military, he said, “We’re working very closely with our clients in order to ensure that all these critical operations are maintained. We allocate the volumes as best as we can.”

In a shortage, helium sold for party balloons and other lifting applications gets cut off first, Garvey says. Medical uses like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are the highest priority, followed by semiconductor manufacturing and aerospace. Scientific research is in the middle and sometimes gets squeezed, she says.

Air Products and Chemicals, Linde, and Iwatani are the other major customers for Qatari helium, Garvey says, but those firms also extract helium from natural gas operations in other parts of the world. Messer and Matheson have significant resources in North America, including the former US government helium reserve in Texas, now owned by Messer. And ExxonMobil has sizable helium operations at its natural gas facilities in Wyoming.

Liquid helium is traded in shipping-container-sized refrigerated tanks known as ISOs. At the start of the war, Garvey estimates, 200 of the world’s 3,000 helium ISOs were inside the Strait of Hormuz, straining global helium logistics even beyond the loss of the output from Qatar. The Strait remains mostly closed, but shippers and industrial gas firms have started getting them back into circulation by moving them out over land, she says.

Before the conflict, Garvey says, semiconductor manufacturers in Taiwan and South Korea imported 85% and 60% of their helium from Qatar, respectively. Helium is a critical raw material for chipmakers but a relatively small part of their overall cost. As a result, firms that use helium to make electronics are willing to pay a premium to stay near the top of the priority list.

Only helium from Qatar, ExxonMobil’s Wyoming plant, and Messer’s Texas facility is certified for use on semiconductors, a limitation that increases the pressure on North American supplies.

Government officials in Taiwan have confirmed that the country is coming to the US to buy up helium. “TSMC is reportedly willing to pay two-to-four-times-higher prices to ensure it maintains a buffer stock of at least 1 month of inventory,” says Xavier Smith, an analyst who leads energy and industrial work at the market research firm AlphaSense, referring to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, a big chipmaker.

“There is clear evidence that Taiwanese buyers—led by major semiconductor manufacturers and supported by the government—have pivoted to North American suppliers to secure helium,” Smith says. “This strategic shift is exacerbating the global helium shortage by increasing competition for limited supplies and driving up prices internationally.” He says the spot price for helium has doubled to around $190,000 per metric ton since the war in Iran began, and users across all sectors are facing logistics surcharges of up to 30%, even on their existing supply contracts.

According to a PANIC attendee who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t preapproved to speak with the press, some large firms with strong research and development budgets have contracts where they always pay a premium over the going rate for liquid helium. In exchange, they stay at the top of the priority list when there isn’t enough for everyone.

But despite the opportunity for price gouging, Garvey says, large industrial gas firms won’t simply give all the helium to the highest bidders. The business is set up around long-term contracts and relationships with steady and reliable customers. “The majors will do everything they can to keep those customers happy,” she says. Rerouting supply lines makes everything more expensive, but the market has enough helium to go around once those rearrangements all get into place, she says. “We’ll get through this, but it’ll cost you more.”