Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe and one of the scarcest useful substances on Earth. It boils at 4.222 K — lower than anything else on the periodic table — which is why MRI scanners, quantum computers, fibre-optic draw towers and rocket launches all run on it. It is also, still, what we put in balloons.
4.222K
−268.9 °C. No other element stays liquid that cold, and helium never freezes at atmospheric pressure at all. Every superconducting magnet on Earth is a customer of that one number. Source: Royal Society of Chemistry.
01 / The cold ladder
Cheap cryogens run out fast. Dry ice stops at 195 K, liquid nitrogen at 77 K — still far too warm for the niobium-titanium wire in an MRI magnet, which only superconducts below about 9.2 K. Below that rung there is one liquid left.
02 / Supply
Helium is not manufactured. It accumulates underground from the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium over hundreds of millions of years, and is only worth extracting where natural gas happens to trap it. World production was an estimated 190 million cubic metres in 2025 — and the United States plus Qatar accounted for 76% of it.
Up 4% on 2023. Six new US helium operations came online in 2025, plus new plants in Canada and South Africa.
81 million cubic metres of Grade-A and gaseous helium — a rounding error in commodity terms, and a single point of failure for modern physics and medicine.
Then Qatar 28%, Algeria 10%, China 5%. US and EU sanctions barring Russian helium remained in force through 2025.
03 / Demand
This is the whole argument in one chart. In 2025, US helium going into lifting gas — party balloons, blimps, weather sondes — outranked helium going into magnetic resonance imaging.
Shares of US helium use in 2025, per the USGS. Bars are scaled to the largest category, not to 100%. Note that no substitute exists for the two cold applications — but a balloon can be filled with air.
04 / Price
The USGS base price for Grade-A helium — before the surcharges producers layer on top — rose 85% between 2020 and 2023, then eased as new plants opened. Research labs reported paying premiums above list during the 2022 squeeze.
In June 2024 the Bureau of Land Management completed the sale of the Federal Helium System — the Cliffside storage field near Amarillo and a 423-mile crude helium pipeline — to Messer. Proceeds to the US Treasury: $460 million. The United States no longer holds a helium stockpile.
Healthcare's share of the global helium market in 2021, as cited by RSNA — the reason a gas-market disruption becomes a radiology-scheduling problem. Industry estimate, not a measured figure.
05 / The leak
Releasing helium doesn't destroy it. It does something worse: it dilutes it into the atmosphere at roughly five parts per million, a concentration at which recovery costs vastly more than drilling for it. And unlike every other gas we vent, helium is light enough to leave the planet for good.
By volume. Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe — the Sun is about 24% helium by mass — and a trace gas in the air you are breathing.
The time in which the present atmospheric helium inventory turns over, per MacDonald's classic 1963 analysis. On human timescales the loss is slow; on any timescale it is one-way.
Helium atoms per cm² per second lost by thermal (Jeans) escape, against a crustal influx of about 2×10⁶ atoms cm⁻² s⁻¹. The one element that routinely leaves Earth.
06 / The fix
The engineering answer already exists. A conventional MRI magnet is filled with roughly 2,000 litres of liquid helium and tops up over its life; sealed micro-cooled magnets are pre-loaded once with 7 litres and never refilled, even through a quench.
Plus losses at every service event and shutdown. Reclamation units on newer scanners recapture much of the boil-off.
0.35% of a conventional fill. Bars are to the same scale — the second one is genuinely almost invisible. Manufacturer figure (Philips BlueSeal).
World production of helium-3 in 2024 and 2025 — the entire planetary supply, produced mostly as a by-product of tritium decay in Canada, Russia and the United States. Dilution refrigerators built from He-3 and He-4 are the only technology that cools continuously to the 10–20 millikelvin where superconducting qubits work.
Neutron detectors, research, quantum computing. Every quantum computer being built today is a bet on a gas measured in tens of thousands of litres a year, worldwide.
Why it matters
Helium is the rare case where a resource problem has a genuinely painless first move. Nobody has to give up an MRI, a fibre-optic cable or a rocket launch. The 17% of US helium that floats away as lifting gas is the only category on that chart with a costless substitute: air.
Foil and latex balloons vent their contents within days. Air-filled arches, paper decorations and reusable displays do the same job with none of the supply chain behind them.
If you work in a lab or a hospital, boil-off recovery and closed-loop recycling systems are now standard options. The USGS notes large-volume users still seldom recycle.
Procurement decisions made this decade determine hospital helium demand for the next twenty years. A 7-litre magnet is a permanent reduction, not a promise.
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