Why is there a worldwide helium shortage

Radioactive decay causes uranium rock to disperse helium into natural gas chambers over millions of years. It's a slow process, and finding the helium can be even more challenging.

The low price and availability of helium made it the default carrier gas for the majority of GC users over the past 40 years. As disruption to supply has been experienced by labs globally, there is increasing interest in gas generators which offer a technology that eliminates reliance on cylinder supply chain and provides labs with an uninterrupted gas supply.

The PEAK Precision generator range produces ultra-high purity Nitrogen and Hydrogen to supply carrier gas and detector gas, which gives labs the possibility to eliminate cylinders entirely. For any GCs requiring air for flame support, there is also a Precision Zero air generator that completes the Precision range. There are safety concerns from some quarters regarding hydrogen use, although many labs have been using hydrogen as flame gas for GC-FID for years.

One of the main concerns is the flammability of hydrogen. Hydrogen has a lower explosive limit of 4. Hydrogen generators, which produce hydrogen gas on-demand from de-ionized water, are a safer source of high purity hydrogen compared to traditional supplies such as cylinders. A hydrogen generator will typically contain less than a liter of gas at any one time, whilst being capable of supplying the requirements of an entire lab. As we move through the s, a shift to reliance on helium supply from countries outside the US is expected with Qatar and other natural gas-rich regions expected to dominate the market by 9.

Depending on the quantities of helium available and demands from various industrial sectors, it is likely that its availability will be increasingly restricted by suppliers to reduce market fluctuation. In this scenario, it is likely that laboratories will need to continue to reserve helium for applications where no viable alternative is available and to use hydrogen and nitrogen, where possible. It happened when he observed a yellow line in a spectrum taken near the edge of the sun. These are just a few of the many places that helium touches our daily lives — demonstrating just how important it really is.

Curious about some of its other uses? Take a look at our blog exploring the most essential and underappreciated uses of helium. Though extremely abundant in space, the helium that we use in our daily lives can be found in a few much more terrestrial, and limited, sources. Helium is so much more abundant in space because it is lighter than other gases in the atmosphere, which means that there is nothing stopping it as it travels into space. It is also produced directly in space where it is a product of the fusion reaction occurring within stars like the sun.

In terms of helium remaining within our planet, it is created as a result of other changes happening below the crust of the earth. However, this is an expensive and inefficient process, so the number of natural gas fields that have enough helium and processing power present to make it worthwhile is small. The extraction process starts with natural gas that is at least 0. It then undergoes a number of industrial processes that filter impurities like water, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide from the gas.

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Almost extinct in the US, powdered laundry detergents thrive elsewhere in the world. Helium shortage 3. But is likely to bring more changes to the global market for this critical, nonrenewable gas. The following is the script for the podcast.

We have edited the interviews within for length and clarity. Kerri Jansen: In the summer of , scientists at the University of Maryland Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research were facing a big problem.

They rely on regular deliveries of liquid helium to cool their nuclear magnetic resonance instruments. And during the transfer, gaseous helium in the supply tank caused a rapid boil-off of remaining liquid helium in the magnet.

Robert Brinson: So I just want to emphasize that this is not like running out of gas in your car where you can just kind of go get a gas can. This is literally, it is a very involved and expensive process requiring hundreds of liters of liquid helium in order to get the magnet back up. And the NIST scientists are not alone in this. In the last couple of decades, shortages in helium supplies have become a recurring nightmare for scientists who rely on the noble gas to keep their NMRs and other critical instruments running.

Welcome to Stereo Chemistry , Craig. Craig: Well, like you said, helium shortages have been a concern on and off for a couple of decades now. Before that, there were shortages in — and — Some analysts think that shortage 3. Kerri: And can you give us sort of an overview of why helium is important to the world and to chemistry? And balloons are a big thing. Another big chunk goes to manufacturing. And what that means is when you compress it down into a liquid, that liquid is very, very cold—around 4.

So liquid helium is the coldest. Down near 4 K, superconductors can pass electric current with zero resistance, an effect that lets you create very strong electromagnets. That enables technologies like nuclear magnetic resonance, NMR, magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, along with cryostats, quantum computing, and other sorts of scientific endeavors.

That magnet is sitting in a bath of liquid helium, and it needs to stay cold or you can have a real crisis on your hands for the instrument. Where does helium actually come from? Craig: Helium is extracted from underground deposits. Craig: John works on developing supply chains for thorium and other critical materials like helium. And as he told me, the thing that makes helium really tricky is that unlike just about every other material, once you vent helium—once your helium balloon pops—that helium goes up, up, up, it keeps going, it goes to space, it is gone.

Like almost no other material on Earth it is gone. Craig: Well, there are a few reasons. John Raquet, editor-in-chief of the industry journal Gasworld, told me that commercial helium is extracted from natural gas wells, where it makes up a small portion of the gas. But the energy industry—especially in North America—has moved away from using conventional natural gas wells and toward fracking, which is used to extract gas and oil from shale formations.

Craig: Another factor in the US is the shutdown of the Federal Helium Reserve, which is kind of a big pillow of helium that softens the blow of market disruptions. The US federal government built up a massive stock of helium starting during the Cold War and stored it in a giant geological formation near Amarillo, Texas, that as far as we know is unique in the world.

So in , the government instructed the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the Reserve, to sell off the helium, which they did at significantly cheaper than market prices, with some stops and starts along the way. Those auctions are all done now and the reserve is scheduled to mostly be shut down in John Kutsch says the flood of cheap helium really damaged private industry. Craig: In response, John says, Congress overhauled the program in and directed the BLM to raise prices dramatically in an attempt to stimulate the industry.