Take a look at this balloon, and this one and this one.
They're all filled with helium.
It's the second most abundant element in the known universe.
So why then are you reading headlines like this one and this one and this
one about how the Earth is running out of helium?
When Party City announced its financial results for the first quarter of
2019, the company also announced it would be closing 45 of its 870 stores.
Party City said the closures were unrelated to the helium shortage but at
the time CEO James Harrison said a lack of helium was hurting its balloon
business and as a result its bottom line.
It's not just Party City bearing the brunt of the helium shortage.
A lot of big industries have a lot at stake-from tech to health care.
Here's why the world's supply of helium is running short.
First a brief history lesson.
Helium was identified in 1868 by French Astronomer Pierre Janssen, almost
unintentionally.
While looking at the sun's rays during a solar eclipse, Janssen noticed a
strange yellow light coming from the surface of the sun.
It was something we didn't have a name for yet.
The name came when British astronomer Norman Lockyer also observed the
same yellow light being emitted.
He named the newly-discovered element helium, after Helios, the Greek god
of the sun.
And while party balloons may be the most well-known use of helium, it's not
the most common.
Helium is a noble gas which means it's nonreactive, nonflammable and on
Earth it has no color or smell.
In its liquid form, Helium can reach extremely low temperatures without
freezing which makes it incredibly useful for many scientific purposes.
Phil Kornbluth has been in the helium business for over 35 years and knows
how useful it can be.
Liquid helium is used as refrigerant for the superconducting magnets that
are basically the guts of an MRI scanner.
So that's the largest application and the one that many people don't
realize that there's helium involved when they're getting an MRI scan.
It cleans fuel tanks on rockets, it's used in optical fibers to bring
internet to the masses, to manufacture semiconductors and a lot more.
So what's at the root of the helium shortage?
The shortage is mostly due to the fact that existing source of helium have
been in decline or have been depleted partially. So
the shortage is really more about supply going down as opposed to demand
going up.
Helium might be incredibly abundant in the universe but it's rare on Earth
and extremely difficult to capture.
It's a non-renewable resource and it's mostly found in underground
chambers where radioactive decay causes uranium to release helium into
natural gas reserves over millions of years.
Oil companies extract the helium through a process known as fractional
distillation, where natural gases are broken down into their individual
elements to isolate the helium.
But once the companies have the helium it's nearly impossible to store it
without leaking.
And once the helium is in the atmosphere it easily escapes into space.
The United States has been the largest producer of helium since 1925,
thanks to a massive reserve found between Texas, Oklahoma and
Kansas—fittingly named the Federal Helium Reserve.
Recently though, the tiny nation of Qatar has grown to become the second
largest exporter of helium in the world.
But recent political tensions and embargoes in the region forced the
state-owned natural gas company, RasGas, to shutter its helium plants in
2017 thereby choking the global supply chain.
Tensions have since cooled but RasGas merged with QatarGas in 2018 and
limitations still exist for the region.
The embargo of Qatar remains in place and the supply chain from Qatar is
longer, more costly and less reliable than it would be without that
embargo.
This is not the first helium scare in recent years.
In 1996, the United States passed the Helium Privatization Act.
It ordered the U.S.
government to sell off the entire Federal Helium Reserve.
The plan was to sell the helium at a fixed price rather than at auction.
This ensured that the gas would sell quickly but most likely be used
wastefully. Nearly two decades later in 2012 experts warned of dire
consequences due to dwindling helium supplies.
So a year later Congress passed the Helium Stewardship Act, which required
helium to be sold at auction rather than at a fixed price.
This won't do anything to stop the intended depletion of the Federal
Helium Reserve which is still expected to close down production in 2021.
In the past, new helium reserves were discovered by accident but geologists
are beginning to research new ways to find helium reserves under the
earth's surface.
There is a lot of exploration going on in the Four Corners area of the
southwestern United States and there is also some exploration going on in
Saskatchewan Alberta Montana.
I think the 2020s is will be a better decade were for helium
supplies than the 2010s to be honest.
The goal is to keep MRIs powered up, the Internet flowing and your party
balloons from falling flat.