Helium Shortage 4.0: From Crisis to Recovery

With preparations at Butterworth Laboratories well underway for the Making Pharma 2025 conference in April, I thought an update might be interesting.  It is a follow-up to my own helium shortage presentation at the conference in 2024, which appeared to be well received.

After 16 years of continued periodic shortages, 2022 had been expected to be the year that the helium market finally returned to a plentiful global supply.  However, on January 5^th 2022, a large explosion and resulting fire at Russian company Gazprom’s Amur facility stopped production until September 2023 and delayed the return to ample supply until 2024.  The US Federal Bureau of Land Management also experienced a major production stoppage from January to June 2022, removing a further 15% of global supply from the market.  A  further number of smaller supply outages, including maintenance at two plants in Qatar, also occurred.  Together these restrictions in supply resulted in Helium Shortage 4.0 (HS 4.0), which affected supply throughout all of 2022 and 2023.  Global industry referred to this period of production as HS 4.0 because it was the 4^th period of global supply disruption since 2006.  Beginning in Q2 2023, HS 4.0 started to ease because of weak demand from the electronics industry, which comprises about 25% of total helium consumption, along with supply from new sources.  We finally saw the end of HS 4.0 early in 2024.  The elasticity in supply afforded by the end of HS 4.0 allowed the UK and EU to add helium to the list of sanctioned materials applied since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine without a negative impact on supply.

My next blog will highlight long-term helium concerns, both positive and negative.  To my knowledge, the negatives I highlighted in 2024 have yet to be addressed, and I would be very grateful if anyone could share any information regarding their implications.    

Author: Frank Judge Consultant Chemist – Chromatography

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