For more than a year, the fate of the Helium Federal Reserve, one of the world’s largest and most trusted suppliers of helium, has been uncertain.
The gigantic underground structure is made up of nearly 500 miles of pipeline, stretching from Amarillo, Texas, to the Oklahoma Peninsula and Kansas, and supplies approximately 40% of the world’s helium.
“It was supposed to be sold by 2021,” said Sophia Hayes, a professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the country’s leading helium experts. “But for the last year, it’s been quiet.”
For the better part of a decade, scientists like Hayes have urged government officials to hold onto the reserve, rather than sell it to a private entity, likely a major industrial gas or pipeline company, and possibly a foreign-owned one. They say that Congress’s decision in 1996 to launch a 25-year plan to discharge the reserve, in an attempt to reduce the size of government, was short-sighted and potentially damaging to a host of industries, ranging from medical technology to rocket science.
Last week, a government-issued helium bulletin inflated his hopes that the United States might be thinking more about helium.
On January 30, a a notice was published to the Federal Register by the US Geological Survey seeking public comment on “whether there is an increased risk of helium supply disruption.”
At first glance, the notice may not seem like much.
But Hayes and several other scientists NBC News spoke to say it’s one more sign that the federal government is paying close attention to an increasingly volatile helium market and potentially rethinking the terms and timing of the reserve sale. .
“Every delay, every pause in the sale, every discussion about the value of helium gives us hope that maybe someone is paying attention,” Hayes said.
For the average consumer, helium is not a particularly important issue. To most, it’s best known as the lighter-than-air gas that gives party balloons air and, when inhaled, makes people sound like chipmunks.
But liquid helium is liquid gold for a host of industries, according to Bill Halperin, a physics professor at Northwestern University, who uses helium for low-temperature physics and to provide a liquid bath for superconducting magnets used for nuclear magnetic resonance.
“Helium is a non-renewable resource. NASA and SpaceX need helium for liquid-fueled rockets,” he said. “The MRI industry needs helium. The pharmaceutical industry depends on helium. And so is the Department of Defense.”
Halperin points out that the Department of Defense uses helium not only for missiles, but also for surveillance balloons.
“It is very important to have a state of observation that does not compromise human life. And the balloons provide that. In Afghanistan and Iraq, helium balloons were used to monitor activity.”
Is widely believed that the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, shot down by the US military on Saturday after passing over the northern US earlier in the week, was a helium balloon.
Scientists estimate that, at the current rate of global consumption, there is a supply of helium for another 100-200 years. There are only a handful of major sources of helium in the world: the US, Qatar, Algeria, and Russia among them. But due to geopolitical situations in other parts of the world, the US supply is considered the most reliable.
Established in the 1920s for what was then a flourishing airship industry, the Federal Helium Reserve quickly became the preferred choice of many scientists and private companies when it came to sourcing reliable helium.
The value of the reserve, Hayes said, also extends to the unique, natural formation in which the helium is stored. The dolomite structure, a massive cave-like formation situated beneath two layers of salt that act as a lid, allows the reserve to do what virtually no other known place in the world can do: store helium for the long term.
“Helium can escape through virtually any container above ground,” he said. “We make steel containers to hold helium, but some of it always leaks, despite our best efforts. So to preserve and contain the helium in the long term, we need places like the reserve, which are waterproof.”
While scientists are finding new ways to recycle helium, finding storage facilities to retain helium that are waterproof and equipped with machinery to remove and refine helium on demand, as the Federal Helium Reserve does, will not it is an easy task.
“For the last century, we’re the only one that’s had a container like this for helium,” Hayes said. “There is no point in selling this infrastructure.”
The original terms of the legislation enacted to sell the Federal Reserve Helium set a deadline to sell at September 30, 2021.
But the Bureau of Land Management delayed the sale, handing over the Federal Reserve Helium assets to the General Services Administration, which has scheduled an auction for last year. That sale has yet to materialize.
NBC News has contacted both the BLM and the GSA for comment on the status of the Federal Reserve’s sale of Helium. The former referred all questions to the latter, who did not respond to the queries.
Halperin is among those concerned about what will happen if the government sells the Federal Helium Reserve to a private entity, and what it could mean not only for scientific advances, but also for consumers.
“The helium shortage has already affected MRIs,” he said. “If hospitals don’t have access to helium for MRI machines, patients may not have access to MRIs or may have to pay additional fees, which could be extraordinary.”
The United States is currently experiencing the fourth in a series of helium shortages since 2006, according to helium consultant Phil Kornbluth.
“The world has experienced eight years of helium shortages in the last 17 years. It’s been a pretty unreliable supply chain,” he said, noting that the war in Ukraine has indefinitely disrupted Russia’s helium supply to the global market. “Helium prices have in many cases doubled since January 2022. Contract prices have increased by 50-100%, in some cases even more.”
Kornbluth said that selling the reserve now may lead to further price increases.
“I would definitely be in favor of suspending the Fed’s sale of Helium at least temporarily,” he said. “The global supply of helium right now is quite fragile. We are in short supply.”
But exactly how long the Federal Reserve’s sale of Helium can be delayed, or whether the sale of the reserve can be stopped permanently, is complicated.
“I think there are a lot of questions about who has what authority to do what,” said Mark Elsesser, director of government affairs for the American Physical Society, the nation’s largest physics membership group. He has been communicating with government agencies for years about the merits of helium, and last month he met with government officials to discuss the reserve.
“It was an act of Congress that said this would sell, so I think it’s going to take an act of Congress to say this won’t sell.”
While Elsesser said that, in a perfect world scenario, he would like to see the reserve remain in federal hands, he realizes that it may be more realistic to focus on setting specific terms related to any final sale.
“For me, the real concern I have with the federal government selling the reserve is that the federal government will no longer have any control over this critical, nonrenewable, irreplaceable natural resource,” he said. “Whoever the reserve is sold to, at that point, the federal government is just negotiating with private companies about buying helium, whether it’s available or not. At the point of sale, the federal government is totally out of the helium game.”
