Are We Really Running Out Of Helium, And Why Can't We Just Make More?

Earth is not running out of helium in any geological sense: identified resources of about 40 billion cubic meters would cover roughly two centuries of use at the 2025 rate, and the planet's rocks keep making more as uranium and thorium decay. The real problem is that helium forms slowly, only a handful of gas fields hold it under salt seals, and once released it drifts to the top of the atmosphere and leaves for space at about 50 grams per second. We cannot make it instead, because no chemical reaction can create an element, and a one-gigawatt fusion plant would yield only about 74 kilograms of helium a year against a world demand of 32,000 tonnes.

Helium was found on the Sun before anyone found it on Earth. In 1868, astronomers saw a yellow line in the Sun's spectrum that matched no known element. Norman Lockyer named it after the Greek word for Sun. Another 27 years passed before William Ramsay heated a lump of uranium ore in London and saw the same line. The Sun had it in bulk. Earth had it in traces, leaking out of stone.

Helium is the second most common element in the universe. The Sun turns 600 million tonnes of hydrogen into it every second. Yet on Earth, hospitals, chipmakers and NASA all worry about getting enough of it. In March 2026, a war in the Persian Gulf took a third of the world's helium off the market in days.

So are we running out of a gas the universe is swimming in? And if so, why can't we make more the way the Sun does? The answers need a little nuclear physics, a little geology, and one awkward decision by the US Congress.

What Is Helium, And Why Is It So Hard To Hold On To?

Helium is the second element on the periodic table. Its atom is about as simple as an atom gets. Two protons and two neutrons sit in the middle, with two electrons around them. Those two electrons fill the only shell the atom has, so it wants nothing from anyone. Chemists call it a noble gas, which is their polite way of saying it refuses to react with anything.

Three facts about it decide everything else in this article. First, it is light. An oxygen molecule in the air weighs about eight times as much as a helium atom, which is why the balloon rises. Second, it is small and slippery. It squeezes through gaps that stop every other gas. Third, it boils at −268.9 °C (−452 °F), colder than anything else in nature. It is the only coolant that works at the bottom of the thermometer.

Put those together and you get the one idea this article rests on: Earth cannot hold on to helium, it can only trap it. Air is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, and just 5.24 parts per million helium. Almost everything the planet has made has leaked away, except the pockets that got stuck.

Where Does Earth's Helium Come From?

Nearly every helium atom on Earth came out of a radioactive nucleus. Uranium and thorium atoms in granite spit out alpha particles as they decay. An alpha particle is a bare helium-4 nucleus: two protons, two neutrons, moving fast. It slows down in the rock, picks up two electrons, and becomes an ordinary helium atom.

This is why Ramsay found helium in uranium ore: the rock had been making it for a billion years. Ramsay and Frederick Soddy proved the link in 1903.

The process is slow in a way that is hard to picture: a block of granite dribbles out helium at a rate measured in atoms, not grams. Almost all of Earth's helium is helium-4 made this way. The lighter cousin, helium-3, barely exists here, which is why people talk about mining it on the Moon. This article is about the balloon gas, and about where it goes next.

Why Does Helium Only Collect In A Few Places?

Helium made deep in granite does not stay there. It gathers along cracks and faults and works its way upward, because it is lighter than the water in the pores of the rock. If nothing stops it, it reaches the surface and joins the air.

What stops it is a seal. A helium atom is tiny, about 0.2 nanometers across. It is smaller than carbon dioxide, nitrogen or methane. A rock layer that traps natural gas may still let helium slip through. The seals that work are salt and anhydrite, a mineral left behind when ancient seas dry up. Neither has connected pore water for a gas to diffuse through. Where a fault runs up under a salt layer, helium spreads sideways into the porous rock beneath. It pools there, mixed with whatever natural gas is already present.

That recipe is rare. The New Mexico Bureau of Geology notes that more than half of US natural gases hold less than 0.1% helium. Only 17.6% hold more than 0.3%, the usual cutoff for bothering to extract it. A few freak fields in Arizona reach 8 to 10% helium, but most of the world's gas has next to none. That shapes the map of who has it.

Which Countries Have The Most Helium, And Where Does The US Get It?

Because trapping is so fussy, the world's helium comes from a short list of places. In 2025 the world made about 190 million cubic meters of helium, by the US Geological Survey's count. The United States made 81 million of that, Qatar 63 million, Russia 18 million and Algeria 11 million. Three countries supplied 85% of the planet.

The deposits still in the ground are just as lopsided. USGS puts the recoverable helium in known US gas fields at 8.49 billion cubic meters. The rest of the world has 31.3 billion, and Qatar, Algeria and Russia hold most of it. So who owns most of the helium on Earth? Whoever owns a handful of gas fields in Texas, Kansas, the Persian Gulf, the Sahara and Siberia.

The US is a net exporter. It still buys some crude helium from Canada, Qatar and Algeria and purifies it at home. For most of the last century, though, US helium came from one place. Gas fields in Texas and Kansas fed a government stockpile outside Amarillo. That stockpile is where the "running out" story began.

Where Does Helium Go Once It Escapes Into The Air?

A released helium atom does not hang around. Planetary scientists Kevin Zahnle and David Catling put the loss at 50 grams a second. Over a year that is about 1,600 tonnes. It balances the amount leaking out of the rocks below.

The popular explanation is that helium reaches escape velocity and flies off. That explanation is almost all wrong. Zahnle and Catling calculate that only one helium atom in a million leaves that way. Most of it is thrown out by something stranger, called the polar wind.

Near the magnetic poles, Earth's field lines do not loop back to the ground. The solar wind drags them open, so they trail off into space. High in the atmosphere, ultraviolet light knocks electrons off atoms. The light electrons float above the heavy oxygen ions, which are too massive to escape. The gap between them sets up an electric field. That field flings the lightest ions, hydrogen and helium, up the open lines and out. The polar wind accounts for almost the entire helium leak. The gas in your party balloon leaves the planet by way of the Arctic.

Why Can't We Just Make More Helium?

If the Sun can make 600 million tonnes of helium a second, a chemical plant should manage a few tonnes a year. It cannot. Chemical reactions shuffle atoms between molecules. They never change what an atom is. In Dalton's words, atoms are neither created nor destroyed during a chemical change. To make helium, you have to build a new nucleus, and that is nuclear physics.

The nuclear route exists. Fusing deuterium and tritium, two heavy forms of hydrogen, makes a helium nucleus and a neutron. Each reaction releases 17.6 MeV of energy. So a fusion power plant is also a helium factory. Run the numbers and the factory is pitiful:

1. One gigawatt of heat for a year is 1 billion joules per second × 31.6 million seconds = 3.16 × 10¹⁶ joules, or about 32 million billion joules.
2. Each reaction releases 17.6 MeV, which is 17.6 million × 1.602 × 10⁻¹⁹ J = 2.82 × 10⁻¹² joules, and makes one helium atom.
3. Divide: the plant runs 1.12 × 10²⁸ reactions a year, so it makes that many helium atoms.
4. A helium atom weighs 4.0 atomic mass units, so that is about 18,600 moles, or 74 kilograms of helium.

The world pulled about 32,000 tonnes out of the ground in 2025. Replacing that with fusion would take about 430,000 such plants, each running flat out for a year. The number of commercial fusion plants on Earth today is zero.

What about pulling it out of the air? At 5.24 parts per million, you must process about 190,000 cubic meters of air to collect one cubic meter of helium, or 1,000 tons of air for about 3 cubic meters. Air plants recover a little this way while making liquid oxygen and nitrogen. As a main supply, it is a rounding error, and that leaves the ground as our only source.

Will We Run Out Of Helium In 100 Years?

In 2010, the Nobel laureate Robert Richardson warned that helium could run out within 25 to 30 years. Sixteen years on, that warning is the "helium myth" people now ask about. Richardson was not wrong about the physics. He was angry about a price.

The United States began stockpiling helium in 1925 for its airships. From 1960 it bought helium from gas producers and pumped it into the Bush Dome, a spent gas field near Amarillo, Texas. By the 1990s the dome held about 30 billion cubic feet, around ten years of world demand at the time. The program also owed the Treasury $1.4 billion. Congress's answer was the Helium Privatization Act of 1996. It ordered the reserve sold off by 2015 at a price set by dividing the debt by the gas, whatever helium was worth on the market. The government became a seller that had to sell. That kept balloons cheap, and it is what Richardson was objecting to.

The Federal Helium System went to the gas company Messer in June 2024, and the Treasury banked $460 million. Meanwhile Qatar's giant gas field came online and new finds kept appearing. One 2016 Tanzanian deposit, which Oxford and Durham geologists put at 1.5 billion cubic meters, has no natural gas in it at all. In 2025 alone, six new helium operations opened in the US.

So: 100 years? Take the identified resources above, about 40 billion cubic meters, and divide by 190 million a year. You get about 210 years at today's rate, before counting anything not yet found. Only a fraction of those resources will be economic to recover, so treat the figure as a scale rather than a deadline. Helium is finite, but it is nowhere near gone, which raises the question of who would miss it most.

Can We Survive Without Helium?

As a species, yes. Helium plays no part in the body. It is inert, no living thing needs it, and the only reason anyone breathes it is a squeaky voice. Modern medicine is another matter.

The magnet in a hospital MRI scanner is a coil of superconducting wire. It only superconducts while bathed in liquid helium at 4.2 degrees above absolute zero. A conventional magnet holds about 1,500 liters of it. USGS is blunt on the point: nothing substitutes for helium if you need temperatures below −256 °C (−429 °F). The same cold runs cryogenics labs and quantum computers.

USGS also tracks how the US used its helium in 2025. Lab and analytical work took 22%, chip fabs and fiber optics 17%, lifting gas 17%, MRI 15%, aerospace 9% and welding 8%. Party balloons sit inside that 17% lifting figure, alongside weather balloons and blimps. They are not the problem, but they are not helping.

Why Is The Helium Supply So Fragile Right Now?

Two centuries of resource is cold comfort when a third of this year's supply sits behind a blockade, as it did in spring 2026. Qatar makes helium as a by-product of liquefying natural gas at Ras Laffan. In March, Iranian strikes and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz shut the complex down. The helium stopped with it. "There is no helium being produced if LNG production is shut," one analyst told AGBI.

By May, C&EN reported reduced supply, surcharges and price hikes for helium users. By late June, QatarEnergy had partly restarted one helium plant. In late July, Air Liquide said it expected that partial restart to ease the squeeze in the second half of the year.

The fragility is built in. Three countries supply 85% of the gas. The obvious backup, Russia, is under US and EU import bans. Helium is a by-product, so nobody drills for it when prices are low. When a gas plant stops, the helium stops too. Unlike oil, you cannot keep it in a tank forever: the liquid boils off, and the gas leaks through steel.

So, Are We Really Running Out Of Helium?

Not in the way the headlines mean. Earth's crust holds a couple of centuries of identified helium at today's rate. New fields keep turning up, and the rocks make more every second. The 25-year deadline was a protest against a fire sale, and the fire sale is over.

But "not running out" is different from "safe". The gas forms slowly, hides under a few salt seals, and leaves the planet for good once it is loose. We extract about 20 times more helium each year than the whole planet leaks into the air from its rocks. We are spending savings, not living off income. Supply rests on a handful of gas fields, a few shipping lanes, and governments that do not always price the stuff well.

The sensible response is already underway. USGS notes that big users seldom recycled helium, but closed-loop recovery is spreading. The biggest single fix is in the hospital. Philips now sells an MRI magnet sealed with 7 liters of helium instead of 1,500 (the manufacturer's figures), so none of it ever boils away. The 50 grams a second that Earth loses to space is the planet's number, and we can do nothing about it. The thousands of tonnes a year that leak out of scanners, labs and balloons are ours.