The world is facing a shortage of helium 21.09.2019

If from time to time you happen to buy helium-filled balloons for children's birthdays, you probably noticed that recently they have almost doubled in price. And the point here is not in the growth of the high cost of life and not in balloons, but in helium. There is a shortage of this inert gas in the world, and today many scientists believe that its use to fill balloons and advertising airships is an unaffordable luxury.

Let's start in order. Helium is an inert gas that has no color, no taste, no smell, and is much lighter than air, which makes it suitable for filling balloons. Helium does not linger in the earth's atmosphere and does not have its own deposits - it is extracted either as a by-product from natural gas, or is extracted from the extraction of other minerals. Until recently, helium was mined mainly at three large sites: one in Qatar and two in the USA (in Wyoming and Texas). These three sources provided about 75 percent of the world's helium production. In fact, the US has been the world's largest supplier of helium for decades, but that has now changed as US helium supplies are critically depleted.

Over the past 15 years, the price of helium has increased by 500 percent, and in January of this year, scientists suggested that in 10 years this gas will not remain on Earth at all. Back in 2013, a law was passed according to which the US would leave the international helium market. At the last auction organized by the US authorities in September last year, where quotas for helium supplies in 2019 were sold, the price of this gas increased by 135 percent year-on-year. There is a possibility that this was the last auction when helium was sold to private companies.

Despite the fact that helium balloons have so far been and remain the main product using helium in the United States, this inert gas is widely used in the aerospace industry, semiconductor manufacturing, scientific research, medicine (for cooling MRI scanners) and others. areas. As a component of the breathing mixture, helium is used by scuba divers when working at depth, since it does not dissolve in human blood.

Today, helium is most often used as a coolant. It has the lowest boiling point among all known substances - minus 269 degrees Celsius, so in its liquid state, helium is an ideal refrigerant. A boiling liquid maintains the temperature at which it boils as long as it remains a liquid - it does not get hotter. Water cannot be hotter than a hundred degrees, and liquid helium cannot be hotter than -269. The resource began to be used to isolate welding arcs, and later - in superconductors, nuclear reactors and cryogenics. Since the days of the Manhattan Project, helium has been used to find leaks: it is an inert gas that does not react with other substances and penetrates holes very quickly.

The first to feel the coming shortage are the main consumers of helium - firms specializing in party goods. For example, shares in Party City Holdco Inc, a North American party retailer, have plummeted 30 percent over the past three years.