Helium: The World’s Most Predictable Supply Crisis
The fifth major Helium shortage in twenty years is still showing up as a surprise on corporate balance sheets
In the early days of the 2026 Iran war, Iranian missiles struck Qatar’s Ras Laffin Industrial complex, the largest LNG importing site in the world. This knocked out one-third of global helium supply overnight. According to the CEO of QatarEnergy, the repairs could take 3 to 5 years. By March 4, industrial gas distributors Linde, Air Liquide, and Iwatani had issued force majeure declarations; semiconductor manufacturers in South Korea (which sourced 64.7% of its helium from Qatar) began rationing. By late March, spot prices for helium had risen 20–50% and the industry was managing on weeks of remaining inventory. The financial news erupted to cover how companies would weather the ensuing crisis.
What is surprising is how unprepared companies seem to be in the face of a helium supply crisis. The Iran war is the fifth major helium shortage in the last 20 years. We have seen critical supply shortages in 2006-2007, 2011-2013, 2018-2020, 2021-2023 and now in 2026. A crisis of helium hits roughly every four years. The current crisis is not a black swan. It is the latest example in a historical pattern. At this point, it has to be asked: why is helium supply risk still treated as an unforeseen risk rather than systematically reflected in corporate financial planning, supply chain contracts and capital expenditure assumptions?
Open with the actuarial framing: five major helium shortages in twenty years — 2006–2007, 2011–2013, 2018–2020, 2021–2023, and now 2026 — means this is not a black swan; at a frequency of roughly one major disruption every four years, helium shortage has become a recurring operating condition for every industry that depends on it
Answering that question requires we understand three related factors. First, helium is structurally unlike any other commodity because it is a byproduct of natural gas extraction. Second, the five shortages have followed the same underlying logic each time – geographic concentration and no meaningful strategic reserves. Finally, the sector most exposed has done the least to prepare. As these factors become clear, we will have a better sense of the correct pricing of helium supply risk would what that risk might look like on a balance sheet.
Helium Supply Is Never Really About Helium
One of the central difficulties in understanding risks and opportunities from helium production is that it is a byproduct of another process. On earth, helium is generated from radioactive decay in and is typically recovered during natural gas extraction because it is trapped in the same geologic formations as the methane sought by upstream oil and gas. However, due to the particular geologic circumstances, helium is only present at economically viable concentrations (greater than 0.3% by volume) in about ten locations around the world. Almost all of these locations are also major natural gas fields. When deciding whether to produce from these locations, the economics are driven by natural gas recovery. Helium is just along for the ride as a side benefit. Where the natural gas economics do not play out, helium is not produced at all. This creates what supply chain analysts call asymmetric pricing dynamics. Helium availability depends economic circumstances that are not related to supply and demand of helium itself. Therefore, factors that impact on natural gas production (price of natural gas, maintenance of gas facilities and LNG trains, missile strikes on an LNG terminal) impact on helium supply.
Helium supply suffers from other fragilities as well. There are only four countries with significant production. Algeria pipes most of its natural gas to Europe and therefore does not go through the process of cooling and liquefication necessary to bring helium to market. Russia’s Amur Gas Processing plant was designed to supply ~25% of global helium but has suffered disruptions from safety accidents in 2021 and 2022 followed by western sanctions. The U.S. is the largest producer and had created a U.S. Federal Helium Reserve in Texas. While production is still online, the Reserve has been privatized and drawn down to the point where it is now effectively gone. In Qatar, the final major producer, all helium production ran through the Ras Laffan LNG facility, which is now facing prolonged disruption from the Iran War due to missile attacks and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
A final fragility of the helium supply is a physical constraint. Helium must be transported as a liquid, requiring specialized cryogenic containers. Approximately 2,000 of these containers exist globally. Once filled, they hold helium for about 35–48 days before the helium warms, expands into gas, and escapes. This means the maximum effective inventory buffer in the global supply chain is measured in weeks, not months.
As a result, companies that depend on helium must assess risk of supply based on the LNG market, the natural gas processing decisions of three or four energy companies, and the geopolitical stability of the Persian Gulf with little to no reserve.
A Twenty-Year Pattern of Predictable Crises
Given the structural fragility in the helium supply change, it is perhaps not surprising that the Iran war is not the first supply crisis for helium. In fact, it is the fifth. The first shortage occurred in 20027-2007 when multiple helium production plants shut down for maintenance simultaneously. It took months for the production capacity to come back online and even then, at significantly lower levels. The market had no buffer and helium prices spiked alongside side curtailments of helium delivery to ‘non-priority’ buyers.
Plant maintenance and operational issues in the U.S. contributed to the second helium supply shortage in 2011-2013. These issues were concurrent with reduced natural gas production in the E.U. Supply tightened and prices once again rose. The U.S. Federal Reserve was able to mask the underlying structural gap at the time through a partial release of strategic reserves to the market.
The third shortage came in 2018-2020 following the 2017 blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The constraint in Qatari helium was exacerbated by production problems at key facilities outside Qatar. The onset of COVID-19 actually mitigated the shortage to a degree by suppressing demand in 2020. However, the market was tight throughout COVID and prices rose by up to 50% despite the drop in demand.
The fourth disruption in 2021-2023 was the most severe at the time. Explosions at the Russian Amur Plant on October 2021 and January 2022 eliminated the additional supply that was supposed to address past shortages. At the same time, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Crude Helium Enrichment Unit failed and was offline for five months. Qatar performed scheduled maintenance on two of its three production lines and Algeria reduced its helium production as it shifted away from LNG production to redirect gas shipments toward Europe via pipeline. The supply chain disruptions were significant. Helium costs for some users such as laboratories quadrupled and many universities were receiving 45-60% of normal allocations. It took until the midpoint of 2024 for prices to restabilize.
Today we are facing the fifth helium supply crisis. As a result of the Iran War, one-third of helium production is offline with a conservative estimate of 3-5 years to bring that production back. Over 200 containers of helium are stuck in transit. Spot prices of helium have jumped 20-50%. Non-priority buyers (retail) have been cut off entirely and priority buyers (medical, semi-conductors) are facing rationing of supplies while staring down the reality of 6-12 week inventory buffers.
There are identifiable patterns in all five of these crises:
- Each was triggered by a different proximate cause (maintenance, equipment failure, geopolitics, pandemic, war) but all shared the same underlying structure: concentrated supply in a small number of geographic locations; dependence on a different primary commodity market (natural gas), with no meaningful strategic reserves and a transportation system physically incapable of holding more than a few weeks of global demand.
- Each time, the industry sought to build resilience, but each time, structural reform was limited to incremental recycling investment and modest supply diversification; the underlying structural fragility remained.
Eight of the seventeen years between 2006 and 2022 were supply deficit years. The years of apparent balance between supply and demand were the anomaly, not the norm. It is therefore inappropriate to interpret helium as a commodity with tail risk. Rather, we should view helium as experiencing a structural imbalance that the market has not corrected because the pricing signal was suppressed (by the U.S. Federal Reserve keeping helium artificially cheap) and the incentive to invest in alternatives or conservation was therefore absent.
The Semiconductor Exposure
Semiconductors have recently surpassed MRI scanning as the largest single consumer of helium globally, now accounting for approximately 24% of consumption in 2025. Semiconductor manufacturing is expected to use 30% of global helium production by 2030. Helium is used at several stages in the semiconductor manufacturing process including EUV lithography machine cooling, cooling of wafers during etching, checking for leaks in vacuum chambers and as a purge gas for EUV lithography. Due to the incredibly tight specifications on semiconductor manufacturing, variations in temperature or impurities can have enormous consequences. These tolerances get tighter as chips shrink making helium irreplaceable. As an example, TSMC’s most advanced products consume ~500,000 cubic feet of helium per year and these intensities of helium use are increasing with each advance in product.
In 2024, Samsung reported a 72-hour helium supply disruption at their fabrication plant in Vietnam resulting in a $300 million loss. The data on both fragility and consequence from helium supply shortages is evident. And yet there is relatively little being done about it. As an example, the CHIPS Act incentivized several hundred billion dollars’ worth of investment in semiconductor reshoring for the U.S. Similar acts were passed in South Korea, the E.U. and Japan. All of this investment is dependent on helium. And yet these acts of legislation bear no mention of helium, no commitment to replenishing strategic reserves and no requirement for risk disclosure or supply diversification measures as a condition of funding.
How Should We Treat Helium on the Balance Sheet?
Helium rarely appears as an explicitly named supply chain risk in 10-K filings. When helium supply is included, it would typically sit under “raw material availability” in Section 1a with a qualitative assessment of exposure and controls. Occasionally, helium is explicitly called out in financial reporting, such as the 2014 Air Products 10-K that notes “lower natural gas production or interruptions in sales from other crude helium suppliers can reduce the Company’s supplies of crude helium available for processing and resale to its customers”, but this remains the exception rather than the rule.
The lack of consistent disclosure is due, in part, to a lack of standardized accounting treatment for helium supply contingencies. Companies do not reserve against shortage risk for helium and so the cost of helium is modeled at current contracted or spot rates rather than a risk-adjusted cost (or expected cost) that incorporates shortage risk. As an example, large semiconductor manufacturers disclose the total gas procurement costs but do not separately disclose helium dependency, geographic concentration of supply, or contingency cost under shortage scenarios. As noted, the CHIPS Act created disclosure requirements for companies receiving federal funding on supply chain resilience, but helium is not specifically named.
More informative disclosure of helium risk would entail an actuarially adjusted expected cost of helium that reflects the historical frequency of shortage (approximately one major event every four years) and the magnitude of price impact during shortage periods (20–400% above normal contract rates, depending on duration and severity). Companies could then calculate and disclose a contingent liability reserve for the operational cost resulting from production slowdowns, priority allocation rationing or emergency spot market procurement.
Companies could also report capital expenditure adjustments to implement helium recycling infrastructure as a risk mitigation effort. The current helium recycling rates average approximately 22% industry wide. TSMC’s pilot program at Fab 18B achieved a 68.4% recovery rate using membrane separation and cryo-adsorption at an installation cost of $2–5 million per facility. Properly accounting for risk-adjusted helium prices could spur additional investments in recycling technologies.
Investors might also like to see a supply diversification strategy. Such a strategy could specify maximum concentration limits for each geography analogous to the single-source supplier limits that electronics manufacturers apply to other critical components.
Helium risk is at approximately the same stage of non-disclosure that climate risk was in 2014 and water risk was in 2020. The physical and financial reality is understood by specialists, documented in scientific literature and industry trade publications, and systematically absent from financial filings.
What Has (and Has Not) Changed in the Face of 5 Shortages
As a result of the last 20 years, we have seen some movement in industry to deal with helium shortages. Recycling investment is accelerating, particularly amongst semiconductor equipment manufacturers. In addition to the TSMC effort mentioned earlier, TEL, ASML, Applied Materials, Samsung and SK Hynix are all piloting helium-reduced or helium-recovery-integrated process tools. We have also seen some efforts to diversify supply chains from investments in regions outside of Algeria, Russia, Qatar and the U.S. However, it will likely be over 5 years before these new supplies come online. There have even been new proposals for strategic reserve development in Canada, the E.U. ad the U.S. However, no funded reserve commitments have been approved to date.
Despite this progress, we have seen little movement by companies to disclose helium supply risk in financial filings. It is also not clear whether P&L’s from in key sectors are still using the contracted rates of helium (i.e. risk-free rate) or the expected actuarial costs. There is also no indication that helium recycling technologies are treated as a capital priority rather than an incremental improvement investment. Finally, governments that are keen to protect critical sectors that rely on helium (e.g. medical and semiconductor) have not yet put the mechanisms in place to ensure supply chain resilience, for example by requiring supply risk assessment as a condition for subsidies or incentives.
Despite these shortages, it is clear that helium supply risk cannot simply be managed through conventional commodity hedging tools. This is an unusually volatile commodity due to a variety of global constraints. Therefore, new disclosures, investments and collaborative initiatives will need to coalesce if we are to develop price discipline before Shortage 6.0 arrives
Three Questions for CFOs and Supply Chain Executives with Helium Exposure
What is our actuarially adjusted expected cost of helium, incorporating the historical frequency and magnitude of shortage events — and does our procurement budget and capital allocation reflect that cost rather than the contracted spot rate?
What is our helium recovery rate, and have we modeled the ROI on closing the gap between our current recovery rate and best practice (~68.4%) against the expected cost of shortage-driven production disruptions?
Does our supply chain disclosure (in CSRD filings, 10-K risk factors, or investor communications) accurately represent our helium geographic concentration, our maximum inventory buffer under a shortage scenario, and our contingency cost if that buffer is exhausted?