The images show differences in how hydrogen atoms in different molecules and different bodily tissues and environments interact with a magnetic field. MRI machines cannot function without helium. Prices doubled between 20 fell by roughly 25 per cent between 20 when there was excess supply and then doubled again between 2018 and early 2020, when COVID-19 curtailed demand for helium. This is the fourth time that helium supply has been restricted since 2006, and each time, prices have surged. That may be impacted or delayed by the sanctions.” (needs) to be replaced … to get the plant back into operation. “It’s become basically impossible for foreign experts to travel to Amur to assess the damage and help figure out what needs to be repaired,” says Kornbluth. The war in Ukraine, and the pull-out of western companies from Russia, likely will push the scheduled restart date from late 2022 to sometime in 2023, Kornbluth says. A further explosion this January again postponed resumption. Amur started producing helium last September, but was hit by a fire during scheduled maintenance in early October. This new supplier was the Amur gas processing plant, operated in Russia’s Far East by Gazprom, Russia’s largest company. “It didn’t create a full-scale, industry-wide shortage because folks thought it was temporary and also a large new supply from Russia was supposed to start up late last year,” says Kornbluth. The plant had already been taken down for maintenance several times in 2021. cannot make up for the helium shortfall simply by producing helium at other natural gas wells because not every well contains helium. The National Helium Reserve once stored decades’ worth of helium, but today it only has enough to match roughly one year of domestic demand, or a third of a year of global demand.Ĭanada and the U.S. government and various private companies can inject or withdraw purified (or “enriched”) helium at meters along the pipeline. Kornbluth likens the National Helium Reserve to an ATM for helium, in which the U.S. This also cut off access to the U.S.’s National Helium Reserve, an almost 700 km-long underground pipeline that runs northeast from Amarillo through Oklahoma to Bushton, Kan. The Cliffside facility was shut down approval to restart it only came at the end of May. “It was really fortunate that it wasn’t an explosion.” “If someone had lit a match, the facility wouldn’t be here anymore,” says Rich Gottwald, the president of the Compressed Gas Association, a trade association for industrial gases, including helium. But in January, there was a natural gas leak at one of the largest helium plants in the U.S., the Cliffside Crude Helium Enrichment Unit near Amarillo, Tex. Helium is most commonly found as a component of natural gas, from which it is crudely separated at natural gas processing plants before being purified at helium plants. Hospitals have been the largest end users of helium in the U.S., making up roughly 20 per cent of the market, says Phil Kornbluth, director of Kornbluth Helium Consulting in Bridgewater, N.J. Helium may be most familiar through its use in party balloons, but that is only a minor commercial application. But as helium becomes increasingly hard to obtain, with once-plentiful sources in the United States drying up and the world’s most promising new source located behind an international embargo, more and more hospitals are turning to models that use less of the widely known but little understood gas. Most magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines require large amounts of helium to produce their diagnostic images.
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