How the Qatar Crisis Shook Up the World's Supply of Helium

Helium has two special abilities. It is extremely light, and it can get extremely cold without freezing.

Largely for these reasons, the element is needed to use or make all sorts of things: semiconductors, rocket fuel, computer hard drives, the Large Hadron Collider, magnets in MRI machines, airships, scuba tanks, arc welding, anything that needs to be super cold, and of course, balloons.

So when helium shortages hit in 2006 to 2007 and 2011 to 2013, the consequences rippled far beyond birthday parties. The Earth is not actually running out of helium, but imbalances in the market, especially around a U.S. government helium reserve, did cause those shortages. Thankfully, relief was on the way. New helium plants came on line in Qatar, and the country quickly went from producing a small sliver of the world’s helium to 25 percent of it in 2016.

Now, Qatar is at the center of a regional crisis that seems to be about many different things, none of them helium. Yet the helium supply chain is tangled up in it. Qatar usually sends its supply over land through Saudi Arabia to a large port in the United Arab Emirates, from which the helium goes out to Singapore and then factories and labs around the world. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have cut off this route as part of the dispute.

Read more at The Atlantic