Helium is a critical material now. The US exports 4.75x its imports

Short answer: On October 23 the Energy Department put helium on its critical materials list. The government's own data says the US is not running out: it made 81 million cubic meters in 2025, about 43% of the world's supply, and shipped 38 million abroad while importing 8 million. The label doesn't fix a shortage. It's a funding pipe, and the companies lining up for it showed up in the lobbying records first.

TL;DR: USGS data shows the US has been a net helium exporter in every year from 2020 to 2025, with exports at 3x to 6x imports. The Grade-A base price rose 85% from $7.57 to $14 per cubic meter between 2021 and 2023, then fell 14% to $12 in 2025 as six new US plants came online. In Q3 2026, the quarter before the designation, two new helium producers (American Helium and Pulsar Helium) filed their first lobbying reports on helium, paying King & Spalding $180,000 and Holland & Knight $40,000. The actual limit is the permit queue and the refining bottleneck. Builders can do something about both.

Key numbers

What	Number	Source, checked Oct 27 2026
US helium sold or used, 2025	81 million m3 (about $970M)	USGS MCS 2026
World helium production, 2025	190 million m3 (US share about 43%)	USGS MCS 2026
US exports vs imports, 2025	38 vs 8 million m3 (4.75x)	USGS MCS 2026
Grade-A base price, 2021 / 2023 / 2025	$7.57 / $14 / $12 per m3	USGS MCS 2022-2026
US helium reserves	8,500 million m3 (Russia 1,700, Algeria 1,800)	USGS MCS 2026
New US helium operations started in 2025	6 (NM 3, CO, KS, MT)	USGS MCS 2026
Unique lobbying filings mentioning helium, 2023 vs 2026 (Q1-Q3)	54 vs 19	Senate LDA API
American Helium lobbying fee, Q3 2026	$180,000 (King & Spalding)	Senate LDA API

The US is helium's biggest seller, not a victim of scarcity

Energy Secretary Chris Wright called helium "essential to producing the semiconductors and advanced technologies that power our economy". Nobody disputes that. Below about minus 429 F there is no substitute for it, so every MRI magnet and plenty of chip fabs run on it.

The open question is whether the US is short of it. USGS says the opposite. The US produced 81 of the world's 190 million cubic meters in 2025, ahead of Qatar (63) and more than Russia (18), Algeria (11), Canada (6) and China (3) put together.

USGS lists the country's net import reliance for helium as "E" every year, which means net exporter. It doesn't get much less critical than that, at least in the scarcity sense, no cap.

Exports beat imports every single year

From 2020 through 2025, US helium exports ran between 33 and 41 million cubic meters a year. Imports ran between 6 and 12. In 2025 that came to 38 out and 8 in.

US consumption, meaning sales plus imports minus exports, stayed flat at 50 to 56 million cubic meters. Demand has gone sideways for six years. The "global demand growing faster than production" line in DOE's notice describes the rest of the world. American fabs aren't the ones squeezed.

A data note: USGS reworked its export series between editions (the 2021 edition reported 100 million m3 of exports for 2020, the 2025 edition reports 35). We use the newest edition for each year and say so in the CSV. The direction holds in every edition: the US ships helium out.

The price spike already broke

The scary helium headlines came from 2022 and 2023, when the Grade-A base price went from $7.57 to $14 per cubic meter, up 85% in two years.

Then the market did what markets do. Six new US operations came online in 2025 (three in New Mexico, one each in Colorado, Kansas and Montana), a storage cavern opened in Beaumont, Texas, and the price slid to $12. That's 14% off the peak before Washington lifted a finger.

Our read: the label is arriving after the shortage healed. That isn't a failure. It's a sign of who the policy is for.

Follow the money: who asked Washington about helium

We pulled every Senate lobbying disclosure that mentions helium from 2023 to Q3 2026 and deduplicated them by filing. The users were loud in 2023: Air Products, Air Liquide, Messer, Matheson, Philips (MRI magnets), the Semiconductor Industry Association, the American Physical Society and even the Balloon Council. That was 54 unique filings from 12 clients.

By 2026 the list had shrunk to 19 filings from 6 clients. Two of them are new, and both are producers. In Q3 2026, American Helium LLC paid King & Spalding $180,000, and Keewaydin Resources, which does business as Pulsar Helium, paid Holland & Knight $40,000 on natural resources and budget/appropriations. Desert Mountain Energy, an explorer, paid $45,000 a quarter through 2025.

The users stopped lobbying because their problem went away. The producers started because a designation like this can unlock money: reporting on the notice says it makes more federal financing available to helium producers. There's nothing shady about it. That's how industrial policy gets made in public, and the timing reads like the sequel to the 2022 panic, not a response to a 2026 one.

So who actually blocks more helium?

We went looking for a villain and mostly found paperwork. DOE's own notice names two constraints: limited refining capacity and lengthy permitting timelines. Nothing in the data points to a cartel or a foreign chokehold on US supply.

Refining matters because crude helium (60% to 80% pure) is worthless to a fab until it becomes Grade-A (99.997%). USGS counts 9 US plants making crude helium but only 5 making Grade-A, plus 4 that purify crude from elsewhere. That's the narrow pipe.

Permits matter because most new helium sits under federal and tribal land in the Four Corners and the northern plains. Every month a well waits for BLM paperwork is a month of 8,500 million cubic meters of proven reserves, the biggest proven pile on Earth, just sitting there.

The ambitious version: helium stops being a byproduct

For a century helium was a lucky accident inside natural gas wells. USGS notes that some of the new deposits are nonhydrocarbon-sourced: helium you drill for on purpose, without burning anything to get it. If permitting speeds up and the Grade-A bottleneck gets more plants, the US could push the price back toward the 2021 level and make cheap cryogenics standard. Think quantum computers, cheaper MRI, more fabs.

That's the bet worth making. Scarcity here is a scheduling problem, and builders can fix scheduling problems.

What this means for you

If you buy helium (a lab, a fab, a clinic, a balloon shop), don't sign a long contract at panic prices. The base price is already off its peak, and new capacity is still arriving. Grab our CSVs below, check your contract against the USGS series, and push back on surcharges.

If you build or invest, watch the producers who just started lobbying. The next DOE loan or grant announcement will name names, and the filings come first. More hard tech on our Frontiers hub, money stories on the news page, and the same supply-meets-subsidy pattern in how solar passed nuclear.

Company Watch tracks any company you name across federal contracts, SEC filings and lobbying disclosures, so you see the American Helium filing the week it lands instead of a year later. It's $99 a month, and we keep fixing it at no extra cost until it does what it promises.

Not financial advice. Our estimates and readings are ours, and the data is public so you can check every number.

Sources

• US Department of Energy, Energy Department Designates Helium as Critical Material, Oct 23 2026
• DOE, Federal Register notice on helium, Oct 23 2026
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026: Helium and Rare Gases, Feb 2026
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025: Helium, Jan 2025
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024: Helium, Jan 2024
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2023: Helium, Jan 2023
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2022: Helium, Jan 2022
• USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2021: Helium, Jan 2021
• US Senate, Lobbying Disclosure Act filings API, pulled Oct 27 2026
• Associated Press via News4JAX, US designates helium as a critical material, Oct 23 2026