Helium Recovery and Purification

There are some helium containing gas wells in every one of the contiguous North American States. Usually these occur where high nitrogen content gas is found. So, you may wonder, why don’t more companies recover helium, especially at today’s prices when helium has four times the value of the equivalent volume of natural gas. The conventional wisdom is that the cost to extract helium is so exorbitant that the processing only makes economic sense with large volume of gas where the helium content exceeds 0.3 mole percent. Azota believes that as the scarcity of this rare gas increases, more businesses will investigate the possibility of recovering the helium they are currently venting or sending down the sales pipeline.

Helium Supply and Demand

The United States Bureau of Mines auctioned most of its helium reserves and with its supply depleted sells only to U.S. government users. This exhausted reserve means that continuing supply will eventually have to come from other sources. An excellent description of the long-term helium supply issue may be found at the website of Helium 1: http://www.helium-one.com/helium-market/

Estimated global supply/demand forecast, mmcf/year.
Source: Edison Research Helium Macro View Update, Feb 2019