RE: The World's Richest Companies Are Fighting Over A Rare Gas: Helium30 Apr 2021 08:14
Growing Helium Demand
Demand for helium is increasing, and it's coming from multiple sectors, including everything from the tech and biomedical industries, to space, medical equipment and national security. And, yes, of course, party balloons and Thanksgiving Day parades. Many industries require helium.
It's been reported that the tech industry has been a massive catalyst, and that 2013 was a game-changing year for helium supply. That's when the world's first 'helium drives' were made commercially available, making helium a key ingredient to fill our monstrous appetite for data.
Some 3.7 billion people are generating some 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. And even those numbers may grow by up to 60% a year. By 2025, it is projected to be more like 160 zettabytes per year. Helium drives were apparently a breakthrough that replaced the air in hard drives with helium to reduce the energy used. They went from concept to commercialization in 2013.
Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Facebook (FB), Netflix (NFLX)--all are said to need tons of it for their massive data centers. Demand is set to surge into the helium-driven territory of zettabytes. And the growing semiconductor market may depend on helium, too. Why? Because helium can bring temperatures down to below -450 degrees Fahrenheit--lower even than liquid nitrogen. This is important for superconducting equipment in particle accelerators and the magnets used to build semiconductors, according to Forbes.
Driving this further is a global computer chip shortage. In Geneva, Switzerland, the Large Haldron Collider (LHC), the largest high-energy particle accelerator on Earth--and the biggest machine in the world, needs a truckload of helium every week.
Nor does the demand story end there …The health sector is another major driver of helium demand. It's also critical for use in cooling magnets in MRI machines. Without helium, we won't have working MRIs. The shortage also threatens NMRs--nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which in turn is a crucial aspect of medical research.
It wasn't without reason or rationality that some medical scientists are said to have begged helium balloon retailers to give it a rest. They were reported to be sucking up 10% of the helium supply. NASA relies heavily on helium, too, as a key gas used in space exploration.
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