Now There's a Helium Shortage and It Affects More Than Balloons

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“Bloomberg Audio Studios podcast radio news.”

Hello and welcome to another episode of the AdLots podcast. I'm Joe Weissenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, one of the things that I've been learning over the last few weeks is that a lot more than oil comes through.

No, for real. Like say, you know, so while it's in a case, there's war breaking out in the Middle East, you just think about oil, right? And then that's probably actually where my mind would typically stop, which is the price of oil. And we all are watching the price of oil, but there are a lot of other things that are sourced

from the region that are critical and poor.

I'm not joking. Like, I'm not joking. I'm not joking. I'm laughing because we have one of those things floating between us. So speaking of stuff that comes out of the Gulf region, here's one of those things.

Listeners can't see it. Not the aluminum itself, although probably aluminum also comes out of the Gulf. But Helia. Tracy's holding a Helium balloon. She went out and got a prop.

I didn't. One of our lovely producers. Dashed it. I have to say, I haven't held a balloon. It's been a long time and it's surprisingly entertaining.

So okay.

While you hold on to it, I'll go a little bit further, which is, I feel bad for the people

“on Helium because my understanding is that the Helium has some pretty important industrial”

properties. There's not a lot of substitutes for it, but someone says Helium and we'll go. The cons are going to be able to make their funny voices, et cetera. Any chance we have to actually bring one of the commodities that we talk about on the show into the studio, I'm going to see.

The fair is some Helium. Well, look, the fact that the balloon is floating is an indicator of the fact that it must have some interesting properties as an element that perhaps of other applications. I don't know. I mean, it tells you something about it as an element.

Well, it's funny you mentioned that because initially I was going to take this balloon and do the thing where you breathe in the Helium and have the funny points. Well, I thought for an audio medium, maybe it would work. But then, in the course of researching on Helium, I read about, apparently it comes partially from radioactive decay and so I thought, well, maybe I don't want to be breathing in the

Helium. Although I also read that it's non-toxic. So, I don't know. We need to talk about what Helium actually is clearly. That's right.

And we've been getting requests for Helium episode ever since there was a headline out today, cut our sim Helium production that is not going to-- some of those force measures or something like that. I don't know. Whatever.

Or something not coming out. Anyway, there's been a lot of requests for Helium episode.

I've never done one, incidentally years ago, I used to lift weights with this guy, the East

Village. Who's like sort of an entrepreneur or something? Helium filled weight? No. But he wasn't Helium.

Among other things, he's one of these guys that has just like finger hands and everything. And he also had like a Helium venture. And he said, go, you got to talk to my friend one day, you guys should do an episode on Helium. And then I got connected with our guests who were about to introduce the second.

And I said, hey, do you know this guy in the East Village because, okay, maybe not everyone had Canada knows each other, but everyone in Helium industry almost certainly knows each other. It's like, oh yeah, of course I know that guy who used to live weight, but it does seem to be a small country.

There's a small industry, which is why we're talking about it today. Which while we're talking about today, anyway. What is Helium? Why is it important? Where do we get it?

Why is it impaired right now? Many questions that people on answered very excited to say, we do have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Nick Snyder, founder and CEO of North American Helium, which minds and sells Helium out of Canada. So Nick, thank you so much for coming on Oddlots.

Joe, Tracy, thanks for having me. How annoyed are you that, like, if that we brought up a moon, they just like, oh, I have the Helium company and like, everyone 99% of the time people are just going to think that's

“like the thing for balloons and therefore can't be that important.”

You know, I've gotten used to it. I've got young kids and they had an exercise at school asking them what their parents did. And they said that I blow up balloons, so the teachers definitely think I'm a clown. And we've got, we all get used to it. Okay, well, why don't we ask in all seriousness, what are the industrial applications for Helium

beyond entertaining us in balloon form? So the biggest demand source, which you've probably seen in the news a little bit because of the events in Iran, is manufacturing semiconductors. And beyond that, one of the fastest growing end uses is for launching rockets for space exploration. And then there's a number of pretty durable, longstanding uses, including leak detection

for everything from every cell in electric batteries to all sorts of complex machinery, manufacturing fiber optics, titanium, MRIs and NMR for drug discovery.

All right.

So what is it about the element Helium that gives it these properties such that it is useful

in, well, you describe it as a fairly wide range of industrial applications. So what makes it so useful is it's got three or four things going forward that are completely unique. One is that it has the lowest boiling point of anything in nature. So liquid Helium is about four degrees Kelvin.

I don't have my conversion in front of me. I think that's negative two hundred and seventy something degrees Celsius. So it's the coldest substance on earth, and that's really important for any sort of superconducting magnets for the moment. Google says that's negative four hundred and fifty two degrees Fahrenheit, so yeah, that's

quite cold. Work at any company in Celsius. Kelvin is our common language. We don't have to fight Fahrenheit versus Celsius here. We're going to class pans with Kelvin.

Anyway, keep going. So just the boiling point alone makes it very unique and important.

“So if you want to have something very cold and that's primarily low temperature physics”

and superconductors, you need to use liquid Helium for that. But the boiling point is also important for launching rockets because if you're launching rockets, you can't pump the liquid rocket fuel into the engine fast enough because of the volume is so large. So you need to pressurize those rockets, and that is primarily done with Helium because

it is lightweight, but also it's the only substance that is non-reactive that remains a gas at the temperature of liquid oxygen or liquid carousine. So it also in addition to being a very cold substance is a liquid. It's also, it's a great heat transfer medium. So if you think about the fiberglass insulation in your walls is a good insulator, and the

copper pot you cook eggs in is a good heat transfer medium, no one really thinks about that with gases, but Helium is very good at transferring heat. So if you were a deep sea diver that they breathe a Helium oxygen mixture so that they don't get nitrogen in our process, when they're in that high Helium atmosphere, they have to heat their habitat to about 98 degrees or they'll start shivering because nitrogen's

“a very good insulator and Helium is a very good conductor heat, and that becomes important”

in semiconductor manufacturing because as they're doing the lithography process, they need a carrier gas that is a small molecule, and Helium is the smallest molecule in nature. That's also something that can transfer heat away to avoid errors and also is non-reactive. So really what makes Helium demands so durable in some of these applications is that you're using more than one of the unique attributes of the molecule.

Wait, just to be clear on semiconductor lithography, the actual etching, how is the Helium used in that process? Is it just like in the environment around to keep it cool or like how is it being deployed?

So I'm not an expert here, I don't want to get out of my depth, but basically they have

a light source in a mask, and then they have to deposit something on there. That is vapor deposition, they need a carrier gas for whatever they're depositing on there, and they need that to be something with a very high heat transfer rate and also a small molecule. They use it in a bunch of other parts of the semiconductor process, but a lot of them like cooling the backside of the wafer, you can recycle, it's the lithography process where

they're essentially polluting the Helium with other volatile compounds.

“That's what's causing demand to grow so quickly in semiconductors, and I've seen estimates”

that the new leading edge chips use 10 times more Helium per chip than older technologies. So the Helium demand from that sector is growing at roughly double the volume of silicon from that sector is growing. Okay, and I feel very after-school special asking this next question while next to a balloon, but where does Helium actually come from?

Helium is only created on Earth by, as you said, radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. Helium itself is not radioactive and divers can breathe it, as long as there's oxygen in there as well.

What's interesting about Helium is that unlike any other critical mineral, once you use it,

it leaves the atmosphere, so you can't go get it out of a landfill after the fact. So that means that you can only find Helium on Earth underground where it's been trapped. And the generation timescales are roughly in order of magnitude larger than for oiling gas. So an oiling gas deposit might have taken in 10 million years to be created in Helium.

You're talking about hundreds of millions of years because it's a very slow process. So we're going to get to North American Helium and the deposits that you have access to. But there's Helium deposits and then Helium also emerges as a byproduct of natural gas.

talk about the Middle East somewhere, Qatar where there's a lot of gas versus say where

you're mining Helium. And then we'll get into some of these different processes. So that's really primarily a function of exploration. Okay. Helium is much more rare than natural gas.

But most of the world's Helium supply comes as a byproduct of natural gas because there's been a huge amount of exploration drilling for natural gas, so that's where they've found it. And there's one, you know, gigantic field in the US midcontent called the Heugotin. That's been on production for 100 years.

“That's what we used to originally fill the federal Helium reserve, the field in Qatar,”

which they share with Iran, although Iran is not able to extract Helium. That has one 20th of 1% Helium in it, so it's a very, very small quantity. But because they're doing so much pretreatment because there's hydrogen sulfide in the gas and because the scale of their own and the facility is so large, that's the largest single source of Helium in the world.

This is really helpful because I just sort of, you know, when we do these things, where it's that thing come from, it's like all these byproducts. So I assumed that Helium was yet just like another byproduct thing that shows up any time you're looking for natural gas, but it sounds like, no, the reason it's there. It's just because there's been a lot of exploration in that area, and they found Helium,

but that it's not inevitable that anywhere you have natural gas, they're going to find Helium. Yeah. So actually on that note, so if I go exploring for Nat Gas and I happen to find a Helium

“to pause it, like, what happens to that Helium if I decide that I want to monetize it?”

Like, how do I actually extract it out of the ground? How do I store it? Do I set up a Helium facility right next to where the deposit actually is or do I move it somewhere else? What's the next step in the process?

The way that the gas separation process works is for the most part, you're actually separating everything except for the Helium because Helium is a small non-reactive molecule. You can't just take that out.

So for the most part, Helium always shows up with nitrogen, so you'd already have a high nitrogen

content in the gas, and then you're going to remove the nitrogen and the methane and be left with the Helium, which you can then purify, and there's really only a couple of fields in the world. There's one field in Algeria that's been on production for a long time and it's falling off.

The field in Siberia, there's the field in the Middle East, the field that's been depleting for a long time in the U.S. mid-continent, but it is really quite rare, and if you think

“about what would be ingredients you need for this, you need to have an area with uranium”

and thorium. And we sort of know where that is because the U.S. and the Russians are in the Cold War looked all over the world for uranium, and you need to have an area where you've got a sedimentary basin where you're going to have traditional oil reservoir rocks, you're sort of looking for a sandstone, and in general, you're looking for an area where there aren't any mountains

because it's a small molecule that wants to escape to the surface, so if you are in a tectonic area, that's going to be the problem for you. That's interesting, so the existence of mountains implies, I hadn't thought about that at all, I would say, oh mountains, that's great, it's probably more deeply buried, let's place for it to escape, but the existence of mountains implies tectonic activity and that's how

you get leaks. Super interesting. Did they have it in Kazakhstan? I know they have a lot of uranium there, is there helium in Kazakhstan? I think there's a little bit of helium content in one of the stranded gas fields there,

I certainly there's no production there, and again, the LNG operation in Qatar is somewhat unique with a very small helium content, if you were to go drill for helium in North America and you're not going to have one of the world's largest LNG complexes there, generally

one-third of one percent is considered an economic cutoff, but a helium content.

Is it true we used to have a strategic helium or a national helium reserve? I can't believe we don't have a strategic pork reserve, but there was a federal helium reserve. Once upon a time when our government was very foresighted, we did build a helium reserve during the Cold War, which was a brilliant idea, both because helium is an important thing

to have, but also because that gas would have been vented otherwise, and you know, good example of this is, in Algeria, they have one field with a helium content, that mixes in with everything else, if they're making LNG from the gas stream in Algeria, then they can recover the helium, but if they're putting it into the pipeline to Europe, which

in Europe, they can't be recovered, and that helium, when you turn on your stove, is just going to escape into the atmosphere. Oh, that's really interesting, so even if you don't have a market or an easy way to sell at the time, what the strategic reserve did was allow us to capture something that would have been otherwise lost permanently, had we not had this sink.

So tell us the story, because evidently we don't have it anymore, what was in it, where was it, and where did it go, who'd we sell it to, what happened? So it was primarily the helium that was the huge and field, which is at this very large field across Texas, and Oklahoma and parts of Kansas, that-- Close to Amorillo, isn't it?

So the field is very large, the gas production from that, we started recovering helium.

We were always the Saudi Arabia of helium as you will.

Side note there is that the Indian bird was designed for helium, and the US Senate blocked

“export of helium for military reasons to Germany, and that's why they filled it up with hydrogen”

instead. So this is going on for a while, and we talk about it being a small molecule, and difficult to trap underground, a good example of that is when it was first found in Kansas, originally helium was discovered by looking at the Sun during an eclipse, and someone was able to see from the spectral lines that there's another element out here, and then they found an inert

gas well in Kansas, and they were able to, you know, distill the helium basically by putting the gas through a bunch of really narrow glass tubes, and the helium will go through the glass because it's such a small molecule, and that's how they were able to distill it. So anyways, we built the world's only helium reserve during the Cold War, and this is something that the science community was very excited about, because they recognized that

this is really important for a bunch of science and physics, but more importantly, if you think about the long term, we're living in interesting times in many ways, but an interesting time, if you think very long term, in terms of the last hundred years, have seen drilling for natural gas all over the place, and particularly for conventional deposits, it's important to understand, you can't find helium and economic quantities in unconventional resources

like Shell. So prior to our company, the last new discovery of helium that was commercialized in North America was 50 years ago. The oil and gas companies aren't looking for these conventional fields anymore, but, you know, the American Physical Society got very upset when we talked

about selling off the helium reserve, and they said basically, this is a molecule that's only

getting more important. We're finding more and more uses for it, and if you think about today, what are some future uses? They're using this for quantum computing to keep things very cold. They're using it for nuclear fusion, for the superconducting magnets. They're

“now using it in, I think, X-energy, this filed for an IPO. Those are helium-cooled”

fission reactors that they're building, SMRs, because, look, do you think about Fukushima? That was a water-cooled reactor and the water got hot, and then the water turned into steam, and it got so hot that the steam separated into hydrogen and oxygen, and then things flew up, but because helium is such a good heat transfer medium, you can use helium as the primary loop there, and in these reactors, and it makes it passively safe. So the physics community

was very up in arms when we decided to sell this off, because they said, you know, what happens 50 years from now when we need this for space exploration and quantum computing and everything else, and there's no one drilling for conventional gas anymore. So, you know, that sort of the issue there, and, you know, we can get into why we sold it off. It won't be a terrible issue. Well, hold on, we're to go, because I can't imagine, like, are we

bought the strategic helium reserve? Let's just go make a bunch of balloons. Like, I assume that didn't happen. So, who bought it, and what they do with it? So, we actually stock while two things during the Cold War Helium and 10, 10, is also used for sending conductors. We sold them both off prior to right now when we started building sending conductors labs in the US, so that's sort of a, you know, not a great choice necessarily. With regard

to the helium reserve, when they originally started, they took the helium out of the gas stream and to your point Tracy, they put it into an old natural gas field in Emerllo.

“So that's why the helium reserve was there, and they filled that up. But the government”

never appropriated funds to pay for the helium. So the Bureau of Land Management or their

predecessor basically owed the government $300 million for this because no funds were appropriated. And that $300 million was a crewing interest to the point where I think in 1996, the

Christopher Cox went to the House floor, and basically said, you know, the government, this

dumb government, has $1.4 billion of party balloon debt. And a bill was quickly passed,

and, you know, signed by Clinton, and we decided to sell the whole thing off. The original

“plan I believe was to sell it off in equal parts over 30 years for exactly 1.4 billion”

with no regard to the market, just to pay off the government's so-called party balloon debt. And the physics community was up in arms about this, but, you know, they don't have that many senators. That's amazing. And I feel like we could do a whole episode just on the helium reserve. But serious question, I guess, or maybe a related question. How difficult is helium to store?

Because we're used to, you know, maybe you go into the party balloon shop in the party balloon district of downtown New York, and you see canisters of helium gas lying there. But on the other hand, I imagine you're talking about the world's smallest molecule, as you said, it must escape quite easily. So if you decide to get into the party balloon business, and you're going to take over

where party city left off. You know, by the way, the only time people usually friends on the street bring up helium with me is every time there's a helium shortage, and we're now looking at probably the fifth in the last 20 years, party city goes bankrupt. And that's actually the answer to the industry. But if you wanted to get into that industry, and you wanted to get canisters of helium, and I hope being an honest person, you would get canisters

of pure helium, because I've heard a lot about people, you know, going 50, 50 in your balloons don't stand the air as long as you remember them that when you were a kid, the helium will be leaking around the threads of the valve a little bit of the air. And the world trade of helium has actually done in the form of a liquid where a liquid helium ISO container can be put on a ship. It can hold roughly five times more than a what used to be called

a tube trailer of, you know, sort of a two-footed diameter, 40 foot long tube, and you'll see these on the highway where there's about 10 of them stacked on the back of the tractor trailer. That's a steel tube trailer now because of the hydrogen industry. There is

carbon fiber over wrap trailers that can hold about a third as much as a liquid helium container.

“So it changes the transportation differential a little bit, and that's what we use, but”

it shipped around the world as a liquid, and as a liquid, it is perishable. So that's part of the reason that whenever, you know, this sort of timeline here is, I have nothing interesting to say about geopolitics, but the Qataris have said they are going to wait until hostilities have ceased, and then they will restart LNG production. And I read that I'll take three or four weeks or something. The helium industry is going to take longer than that to recover

from this, because there's only about 3,000 of these liquid helium containers in the world. They're highly, highly specialized, because you're talking about taking a huge amount by weight of liquid helium, which is at four degrees kelvin, and putting it in a container where it's essentially a very fancy thermos, but this has to be hard enough that you can put it on a truck and put it on a ship, but it's warming up the whole time. And the very

best containers can hold the helium for about 45 days before the pressure gets too high, and they'll essentially vent themselves. So it makes it very perishable, and it makes the containers

“very important, where I would assume that the Qataris LNG facilities have filled a lot of”

liquid helium containers that are now stuck somewhere, and those are slowly warming up. And on the other hand, to deal with a crisis like this, the big industrial gas companies are now going to have to scramble to move containers to other sources, to try and get helium out of storage, where they built some private storage since the Federal Reserve is now essentially gone, and that's going to cause a lot of problems, because it's just a very limited supply of these. I just want to say,

and I really mean this with no offense, but at any time that we have a guest who sort of has talked a lot about science and technology, and do a little bit of live fact checking. I like look up all these things, and it's like, yep, we really did have something called the Helium

Privateization Act in 2016, just about 1.5 billion dollars. And part of the balloon debt, it really

is perceived to be important in quantum computing. It really is perceived to be important in small modular reactors, so I just, you know, for the listeners out there, because I can't, you know, I don't know anything about any of this stuff. This also should check out Helium seems to be pretty important. Now, here's something I've learned over the years, which at any time, we are talking about niche commodities. It's often like harder to find anything resembling spot

prices at all, including a lot of the rare earths and stuff. Sometimes that you'll see these

was a futures market at one point, but it got discontinued in 2018 or something. There's actually

“literally nothing on the terminal about Helium pricing. And I tell us about why that is and how”

what is, how transparent is the Helium market? And what is the cost of a ton of Helium, or whatever, what is the denominator of Helium in terms of how much is sold in the chunk? Tell us about that market. Yeah, so it's a pretty unique market. I mean, there used to be more markets like this, but companies like Bloomberg and many others helped to make things a lot more efficient.

In general, the price to the end user, it's considered to be about a six billion cubic foot per

year market and worked about six billion dollars a year, so that implies about a thousand dollars per MCF to the end user. And, you know, that's MCF is a thousand cubic feet. That's the standard denomination that they use in the actual gas. So that implies that it's a dollar for one cubic foot. And since you insisted on bringing a Helium balloon into the studio, I would fact check you and say, what did you pay for that? Oh, well, I actually don't know. But definitely more than a dollar.

Yeah. And definitely that's not a cubic foot. I'm going to ask our producer and then he can tell us

“in a few minutes. But keep going, while we wait for a response for a producer, what do you tell us about?”

The current market environment and how 2026 looks for 2025 versus 2016, etc. So the market had been trending down since the last shortage which ended in around 2022 when the Russians brought production online. And that was a bit of a surprise to the industry because the German firm Lyndy had been involved with building the Russian facility. They're a more gas project, which processes, natural gas liquids and other things out of a big

gas dream. And it also recovers the Helium from their chandon and covictive fields. And the general consensus because of the Ukraine war is that the Russians wouldn't be able to get that plant to run without the help of the Germans. And, you know, they started up the

first train and had a very large fire and they started up the second train and had a very large

explosion. So everyone sort of written that off. But they were, you know, able to get that production up and running and start bringing it into the market. There are sanctions on bringing

“liquid Helium containers to sanctions might not be the right word. But I believe there's a state”

department restriction on taking liquid Helium containers from the US through Russia because it's still a use that could have a military application. There's also sanctions on taking the Russian Helium at all the places like Europe. So the Russians went into production and basically flooded the Chinese market and it sort of spread out from there a little bit. It's somewhat limited. The impact they were able to have because of the liquid Helium containers, the lack of them and markets

for them. But prices have been trending down. I will say, you know, an answer to your question why isn't it obvious what the Helium price is? There's a confidentiality clause in every Helium contract. So we sell on long-term contracts primarily to the industrial gas companies. But those are all confidential. And certainly from a commodity trader point of view having an opaque market probably is, you know, a pretty good thing. But maybe that originated with the fact that the government

was selling the Helium for exactly 1.4 billion. And no one wanted to, you know, have a futures market there. But also, as you guys know, you know, futures markets sort of need to be deliverable. And there's no longer any sort of global hub. You could have potentially when the federal reserve was a public facility where you could inject gas back into it. You could have built a futures market around that, but no one did. It kind of reminds me of plain delivery contracts where, you know,

the announcement comes out and it's always at a list price. So you know, like an airline buys

$100 million worth of Boeing plans. But the contracts are so custom and opaque and individualized that, like, no one really ever knows how they could plan and so that's super interesting. Our producer Dash, by the way, got back to us. And he says the balloon cost $9, which is more than I would have expected. But what do I know about the land? Well, we're at Helium Crisis. First of all, from your vantage point in the market, what supply disruptions are you seeing

right now? And then secondly, how long does it actually take those disruptions to work their way into the market and start to hit prices given that we just talked about how most of the stuff is

German, but, you know, the Atari facilities in total, we're producing north of 30% of world Helium

supply. And given that there's no federal helium reserve anymore and given that this is a, you know, a perishable commodity, essentially, because it starts warming up. Once you feel a liquid Helium container, that's a huge problem. The longer this goes on, it becomes more and more of a problem. But to your point on timing, there's a leading Helium consultant who we work with for a long time,

“who I think put it very well, where he described the situation last week as it's like a tsunami,”

where the water is already gone out, but we're also doing the beach and the wave hasn't hit yet. And the last car goes that left cutter are probably just now getting delivered to customers. So, you know, the real problems are coming in the next month. This is how everyone, by the way, in energies are thinking about this moment right now, because by and large markets are up for oil, gas, etc, but maybe, you know, not hyper catastrophic levels and everyone's like,

this better open up soon, because the water has come out and we're going to have real problems, the longer we have these disruptions. It's interesting to like this idea that, you know, here's something I wonder about. And it again relates to some of the conversations we've had about where Earth is in the past. The nominal size of this market, even right now, does not sound very large, just $6 billion global market. This is the same thing we talked about the

Hawaii Bloss here at Bloomberg about where Earth's, the total dollar amounts for this stuff are

not that high. And it always makes me wonder, does that impair exploration and production

appetites that it's like, look, yay, we could go looking for new fields, we could drill here, etc. But it's just even in the best of times it's not going to be a great market. And so we have like other things on our mind to do. And I'm curious, like whether small nominal markets make it harder to mobilize capital. 100% and, you know, I don't know what the price of uranium is today, but that's a similar size market. And you know, what you see in these industries when prices go

offer, there's a shortage, is essentially people start doing exploration at the desk where they're saying, who almost found this in the past because they're too expensive to go do it from first principles. If you think about the size of the oil and gas market, it's what hundreds of times larger than helium. So, you know, the only people who could afford to explore at scale in North America, where the oil and gas drill is. So, we've found a niche where we're able to do that because a lot cheaper

than in some other places, but that is really what separates us as a company in terms of we've been focused on grassroots exploration, saying the best stuff hasn't been found yet. And, you know,

“in those other industries, I think that's a problem going forward for a number of critical minerals”

in these commodities where you can say, "Well, hypothetically there's rare earths in North Carolina, but how much do you want to spend looking for them because it can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to go to your holes in the ground?" You know, you said earlier that there'd been five previous helium shortages, I guess, in recent times, what happened during those? Like, how much substitution did you see of alternative gases? I guess I don't know what those would be any on

maybe? And then how much re-rooting did you see from like one geographic area to another? Like, I guess what I'm asking is how flexible is the industry that relies on helium? So, answering that in reverse, the industrial gas companies that really distribute the helium and move it around the world and break into smaller quantities to serve the end user, they do a phenomenal job with this, but it's a very, very technical problem. So, when there's

a shortage, there's absolutely a problem particularly because of the specialized logistics, and there's not, you know, a bunch of extra helium containers lying around and things like that.

“In terms of, what was your question about the previous helium shortages?”

Yeah, basically, how much substitution did you see? Like, are there other gases like neon that you can use instead of helium? And that basically, just how easy is it for people to adapt to an actual helium shortage? So, the first shortage was in 2007, and back then, we had a lot more options

in terms of, in Europe, they've never really had a lot of helium the way we have in the US.

So, for that reason, they don't really have party balloons over there, which is the most visible thing for the average internet. But they also have always used a lot more organ and welding. Helium is used in an inert gas welding because it is inert because it has high heat transfer.

lot of substitution of saying, okay, we still need helium if you're welding stainless steel,

titanium aluminum, if you're doing thicker welds. But in some of the lower spec welding applications, we were able to substitute organ, and you've also seen recycling, where, you know, if you're doing semiconductor lithography, you can't really recycle because you're putting other things in the gas. But if you're purely doing it for a cooling loop, you can start to recycle, and my understanding is that the MRI manufacturer is prior to 2007. They would build an MRI, build up what people

liquid helium, make sure it works at the factory, and then just events it into the atmosphere and shift the unit, and it would be refilled when it got there. So, there's certainly been demand destruction from that. The other side of that coin is that there's very little opportunity for additional recycling or additional substitution at this point, and, you know, I sort of tell people,

“if you're still using helium after four global shortages, you have to use helium.”

There are bulldozer helium balloons in Europe. I fact-checked that. They do exist. They're perhaps neither as popular. I actually found a, this is a very European, this is the most European looking document I've ever seen, which is this really serious, like tank report on the intentional release of balloons in confetti in the Baltic Sea area, scoping study, a collection of existing information regulation and best practices published by the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission

is a 50-page paper on the release of balloons. Anyway, sorry, but I take your point that I also found a Reddit post someone asking where they can get helium balloons, so maybe they're not. Maybe they're not. If the EU has regulations on it, I'm willing to believe they've got it. Now, there's something going on there. You know, the thing, the big takeaway I have from this

“conversation is just going back to thinking about that third year release schedule from the helium”

reserve. And especially if you're not doing it at something resembling a market price, they must have just obliterated any like private sector activity, because if there's going to be this fixed supply coming out to the market and it's not even price-sensitive in any way, why would you ever like build out private production at that point? 100% that's been a big issue.

And when I first started looking at this issue in 2011 because my dad was involved in

trying to advocate for fusion, pigeon hybrid reactors. And he shared a broken semiconductor conference on this. And he was very disappointed. He said the smartest guy there told him he was wasting his time because we were going to run out of helium before they could get the technology working. And you know, I told him he called me and I said, I thought that was a party balloons down cursed

“to be on the other side of that conversation for the rest of my life. But the American”

Physical Society at that time, you know, put out a statement saying, not only should you do not sell this, helium is the one thing we should be building a bigger stockpile of for the future. And, you know, I sort of compared the situation to what happened in your with uranium. In the megatons to megawatts program after the fall of the Soviet Union, we took a bunch of their former Soviet nuclear weapons. We turned them into power plant fuel just because of proliferation

reasons. And sold that into the market. And similar thing, you know, you dump a bunch of supply to the market for a long time. And then there's no incentive for exploration and uranium prices will have, you know, 500% in the early 2000s. So that certainly benefactor in terms of, you know, why haven't people been doing this the whole time? Well, okay, on that note, you're the founder and CEO of North American Helium. And we know that helium prices are going up even though we don't have

a very good benchmark, but, you know, broadly we know that it's going to get more expensive. What do you do with that price signal? Do you invest more? Do you expand given the limitations around, you know, exploring for LNG and things like that? What do you do? We're on the unique end of

the spectrum in the industry because we're not running a 10 billion dollar LNG project or something

like that because we're producing, we're only drilling for helium from non-hydrocarbon sources. So we're essentially looking for, we're drilling into older rocks that predate plant life on earth. So there's not a lot of organic material there. So you're drilling for fields of helium and nitrogen. And these exist and, you know, where we are primarily operating in southwest Saskatchewan and Canada, they had found a field like this in the 1960s. They wrote helium legislation, which made them very unique.

But because of the combination of the four sales from the federal stockpile keeping helium prices well, and nitrogen being worthless because it's already 80% of the atmosphere, no one ever came back and looked at this. But certainly, I would say we were already going pretty fast.

So all of a sudden, this is a big problem. We're going to do everything we can to increase our rate of

exploration, bringing new plants on the production, and, you know, really trying to support some of the most vital uses of helium. And then we've had, in previous shortages, one of the problems is not a question of, for the end-user, it's not a question of whether or not you get the helium or not. The consequences of not getting helium across the value chain are pretty significant.

“If you're a party city, you go bankrupt. If you're a chip manufacturer, you have to shut down”

chip manufacturing, and that's, you know, the dollar amount there is just tremendous. If you're running MRI or their cousin at MR, which is used for drug discovery and things like that, if that magnet heats up, it will destroy the magnet. So you're talking about your machine getting destroyed essentially. So we're very focused on supporting those vital end uses, and people can't do as much welding for a little while. You know, it is what it is,

but in general, the price is very volatile because helium is a very small percentage of the cost of good sold for all end uses. Sorry, just to press out this point, I'm going to assume that you're going to make more money in the coming months as a result of helium supply getting squeezed in Qatar. What are the like major choke points at your company that you would be trying to use that

“money to resolve? Is it actually finding new fields or is it investing in more storage capacity,”

transportation, investment? Like, what are you going to do with the money? It's a little bit of all

of the above. Our focus has always been on the lack of reliability and the supply chain,

which comes from two things. One is the extreme concentration where you've got one X on CO2 project in Wyoming. It's a quarter of world supply. You've got one LNG facility that's a third of world supply. You've now got production in Russia, which has its own issues. So the geopolitics and the concentration are a problem. So we've been working for the last 13 years to build a new helium hub to create helium supply from non-higer carbon sources in Western Canada. And for that reason, we've run a bunch

of stuff in parallel. So we'll be bringing a new facility online that'll increase our production by 40 percent later this year. We're also drilling for doing exploration for the next field. We're also looking at doing much more grassroots exploration for just continuing to understand

the area because we have 9 million acres of long-term helium rights. So it takes three hours to drive

across it. This is, you know, we've identified 1,000 structures from size and data that we have not drilled yet. So it's really all of those things. One of the biggest things that we've been looking at is building a helium liquefire in Canada because right now we have nine facilities that are producing helium. And then we truck all of that in carbon fiber over up two trailers down to existing liquefires in the US mid-continent. And there's a lot of extra capacity down there because

production's been falling in the US for the last 35 years. But building a helium liquefire in Canada along the trans-Canada Highway which runs through the middle of our properties, really lowers the cost, it also lowers the emissions, which is something people, you know, care a lot more about four years ago, what we still think is important. And opens up this area is more of a global hub. And also, if you think about the high-end customers, they're very concerned

with purity. The average customer is taking liquid helium at grade P, which is sort of the industry standard. You can think of it as more or less five nine's purity, 99.99% pure. The leading edge chip manufacturers are now looking for six nine's purity. And right now that primarily there comes from axons, facility where it comes from color. So all of a sudden you got a big issue there.

“And if you want to think about, you know, I know you guys love all of the weird logistical stuff.”

There's only so many liquid helium containers in the world. And if you want six nine's purity, you don't ever want to fill that with five nine's because you might get a molecule of hydrogen in there. So those containers are sort of kept separate. And the fiber optic manufacturers have their own containers. And now you've got an issue where the special containers for the sending conductors firms or traps somewhere, they've got to go somewhere else. You've got to say, well, we need more of

this from the axon facility. And maybe that's going to cause a problem somewhere else. The building our own liquid fire gives us the opportunity to, you know, meet penny purity and be able to sort of, you know, kind of go to farm the table with the whole supply chain. Mm-hmm. Farm to take the opportunity. Farm to take the opportunity. Nicholas Snyder, thank you so much for coming out audlots. I learned a lot about feeling in that

Tracy, I really wanted to do a live episode one day in Saskatchewan with a Nicholas in Marad,

our continued the lentil king of Saskatchewan. We're going to have the helium king of Saskatchewan

“in the lentil king of Saskatchewan. I think there'd be a great live event for us. I want to go scout”

Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan, the planes for helium. Yeah, yeah, me too. And lentils, like us. Now, that was a fascinating episode. I mean, all of these niche commodities are fascinating. I will say one thing that keeps getting repeated on all of these shows and you touched on it. Already is this idea that we haven't actually seen the physical impact just yet and it's coming down the line and you can imagine there are a lot of consumers of specific products out there

who for now are able to say, you know, we're doing all right, but maybe a month, maybe three months, maybe four months, if things keep going as they are. And even frankly, if the war were to stop tomorrow, you would probably have some sort of impact. Yeah, you know, to remind me of May 2025. It's like, the shortages are coming to the shelves because of the tariffs. Yeah. And they didn't. And that it's like, well, but that was partially because Trump started reversing up. I know he did. He did,

he did. But I do think we're at like this weird moment where it's like nothing ever happens, but maybe it will. But yeah, but everyone who we talk to and come on it is essentially is like we're in the phase where the water has come out in the longer it takes for production to restart

“and the straight to reopen the greater the damage is going to be. You know, I think there's a really”

interesting about this conversation in particular. And they're actually from this sort of economic

standpoint, it's like several very interesting threads in there. So first of all, there's the part

about how like if you're selling helium at the same clip every year for 30 years, you destroy and you sort of semblance of a market in the upper private production. That's interesting. Another interesting thing is that okay, like helium itself is sort of scarce and not all over the place. And then the scarcity of the containers to he kept coming back to the containers. There aren't that many containers in the world because of helium can go through glass that means it's so small

and not a lot of contrapid. Even the containers that exist can only hold it for so long. And then the fact that the helium that's needed for the most advanced science, as you mentioned at the end, they want the six, nine, it's purity, not the five, nine, it's purity. And so they have their own separate set of containers that like it's almost impossible to imagine like at this point like a sort of like truly coordinated like commodity helium, just because kind of like natural gas,

so much of the story seems to be in the shipping and holding of it rather than the commodity person. No, it strikes me as very similar. And like helium is even more not gas than not gas, right? It's something that we don't even have any pricing to look at

basically, which is just shocking to me as someone who's been staring at a Bloomberg terminal

for many, many years. It feels really weird when you can't get a price of something. So there is, so like typically speaking, if you enter in any ticker in the terminal, something will come up. And there is actually a something that's a helium fund. No, there's a helium index, but whatever it was, it was put together by the Bureau of Land Management and they ended it in 2018, like they stopped whatever collect whatever this index is in 2018. So there is not a lot of,

there is not a lot of data on helium. And I found that to be the case with a lot of the newsha, yeah, discontinued. It's for historical purposes only according to the DES page. Well, the other way of thinking about it is it doesn't actually look that volatile at all. It seems like I don't even believe the truth. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Well, if anyone wants to create some sort of pricing index for helium, let us know. Yeah, we'd love to check it out.

Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of The All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy All-Away. You can follow me at Tracy All-Away. And I'm Jill Wise and thought you could have followed me at the store. Follow our producers. Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin. Dash will be in it at Dashbot and Kale Brooks and Kale Brooks. For more oddlaughts content, go to Bloomberg.com/Adlaughts through the Daily Newsletter and all of our episodes.

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