Is Helium Really In Short Supply?

Last week I had my first MRI as a result of some recent migraine-like headaches. It was pretty much all I’d anticipated: a Friday the 13^th-style mask over my face, an uncomfortable 20 minutes in the tube, and an array of sounds that replicated—to quote my imaging tech—a bad drum solo. MRI has undergone some positive changes in its recent history, including the development of open and wide-bore scanners, but one aspect that hasn’t changed since its invention in 1971 is the use of liquid helium to cryogenically cool each scanner’s superconducting electromagnet.

Helium is the second-most abundant element in the observable universe, accounting for 24% of all baryonic matter, but usable terrestrial helium is much rarer. Global helium reserves have been in decline for years, and doctors and scientists have been criticizing the sale of helium balloons as wasting the gas critical to medical and scientific applications. Nobel laureate Robert Richardson considers the gas so precious that in 2012 he suggested raising the price of a child’s helium balloon to around $100 to reflect to true cost of helium.

Some of this panic was laid to rest last week, when a team from the UK and Norway announced the discovery of a massive natural store of helium in Tanzania’s Rift valley. They estimate that the area contains around 54 billion cubic feet of the gas, enough to cool 1.2 million MRI scanners. Natural helium supplies are typically uncovered by mistake during oil and gas exploration. But the UK scientists used expertise from Helium One, a Norwegian helium exploration company, to find that the Rift valley’s volcanic activity released helium from eons-old rocks buried deep underground. The released gas then became trapped in fields closer to the surface.

Helium has had some interesting supply chain issues in the US. The country began hoarding its supply—which accounts for about 70% of the world’s helium—during the airship craze of the early 1900s, establishing the National Helium Reserve in 1925 and banning exportation in 1927. The Reserve expanded throughout the Space Race and Cold War eras but poor financial management caused it to become economically insoluble. The 1996 Helium Privatization Act forced the Reserve to sell itself off at a (very low) formula-driven price beginning in 2005. But helium’s non-renewable nature resulted in shortfalls that have caused the gas’s private market price to rise 500% since 2000 or so. The 2013 Helium Stewardship Act mandated that the Reserve stick around until 2021, but many believe the liquidation of the reserve’s gas at ridiculously low prices prior to that legislation doomed US supply.

But the “we’re running out of a limited resource and we’re all going to die” argument is the same one commonly heard about fossil fuels, and in the same vein it has its detractors. They argue that mineral reserves are identified and prepared for use for the next several decades. So instead of panicking about limited supply, concerned individuals should remember that they’ve got the next several decades to identify and mine more supplies for the years following the exhaustion of the current reserve. Some also argue that helium is renewable, as it’s formed, albeit slowly, by the radioactive decay of plentiful uranium. One writer compared it to worrying about starving to death after you’ve eaten all the food in your refrigerator: instead of letting your fridge and stomach become empty, you just go out and find more before it reaches that point.

We can only hope that the Tanzania store drives He’s price down, or at least stops it from shooting up. In addition to cryogenic cooling of MRI scanners and NMR spectrometers, helium has important uses in controlled atmospheres, as a shielding gas in arc welding, and for industrial leak detection. The high cost of cryogenic cooling has made numerous exciting developments, such as superconducting power cables, unfeasible—perhaps this is a step in the right direction? Earlier this year we learned that China is looking to mine helium-3, a rarity on Earth, from the Moon’s crust to combat the supply problem. It doesn’t seem likely the Rift valley discovery will discourage that mission.

Image credit: Public domain