This report originally appeared in the September 2011 issue of DOTmed Business News

The Earth is rapidly depleting its easily gotten stocks of the universe's second-most abundant element, and radiologists should take notice.

The gas, used for super-cooling superconducting MRI magnets, among other applications, is formed during a billion-year process of radioactive decay, and can't be artificially manufactured. The United States owns the world's largest helium reserves, mostly trapped in a series of north Texas wells. This cache is thought to supply about one-third of the globe's helium needs. But we're running out -- and partly by design.

"This stuff is literally going up in the air," Dr. Rakesh A. Shah, a radiologist with Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y., told DOTmed News.

Shah recently penned an opinion article on the topic for the Journal of the American College of Radiology, urging his colleagues to recognize a real, if obscure, threat to their discipline.

In 1996, a budget-panicky Congress passed the Helium Privatization Act, which forces the government to sell off its helium reserves by 2015 to pay back the costs of investing in the system, a process that began in the 1920s.

The Federal Helium Reserve in Texas is running a bit behind schedule, but still should exhaust its helium stocks by 2020, possibly forcing the United States to become a net importer of the inert gas as early as 2025.

Experts argue the reason for helium's speedy depletion is that, in large part because of the U.S. government's mandatory sell-off, the price of the gas is kept artificially low. A 2010 report by the National Academy of Sciences, which pointed out that helium was too cheaply priced, warned about the risks of losing the U.S. reserves, and called for extending the depletion deadline, investing in cheaper ways to recycle the gas and working out a market-driven price.

"The harsh truth of the matter is, the only way to make this last longer is to raise the price," Shah said.

In an interview with the Telegraph last year, Robert Richardson, the chair of the committee and a Nobel prize winner, said if the price of helium captured its true value, the cost of helium balloons, for instance, should be roughly 64 pounds -- or north of $100 -- a piece.

Off the radar
Although helium is used to run high-speed particle accelerators and in industrial leak testing, about a quarter of the country's helium supplies go toward health care, both for keeping MRI magnets cold and generating radioactive isotopes for nuclear medicine, Shah said.

Yet, once world gas reserves run out, the next option will be processing it out of the air -- which, at least with current technology, would be hugely inefficient and costly, requiring the distillation of thousands of gallons of air to squeeze out only tiny usable amounts of helium. Of course, by then, the pressure to conserve the gas could result in widespread, and more efficient, methods of recycling. And one day -- although this is now firmly in the realm of science-fiction -- helium could be extracted from the moon.

Government responds
More immediately, the government has – in part – listened to the complaints of its critics. Starting in 2010, the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the helium reserves, began raising the price of crude helium for open market sales beyond the absolute minimum required by the 1996 privatization act, admitting that the earlier, lower prices reflected the “cost of the helium and not its value.”

In July, the BLM said it would hike up crude helium prices for open market sales to $75.75 per thousand cubic feet by October. “Getting a fair price for Federal Crude Helium is our obligation and this year’s new pricing represents our commitment to that goal,” Leslie Theiss, field manager in Amarillo, where the reserves are stored, said in a statement.

However, the main aim of the price hike is to more rapidly pay back the BLM’s debt (over building the reserves) to the U.S. Treasury. And not all critics are completely mollified.

“Although this new price of $75.75 established by the BLM is a step in the right direction, it still does not reflect true market value,” reads a notice from Inter-American Corporation, a helium exploration and production company. “This new price reflects only a 1 percent increase from the previous $75 implying that the price reflects the Consumer Price Index adjustment only. No market driven mechanism was used to adjust this new price increase.”

DOTmed Registered MRI Keep Cold and Cool Down Companies

Names in boldface are Premium Listings.
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John Bachellier, MBI-USA, CA
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International
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