International helium giant Air Liquide recently issued a formal Force Majeure Notice to its Chinese clients, declaring an interruption in helium supply. This marks the first official force majeure announcement by a major global player in the Chinese market since the outbreak of conflict in the Middle East, indicating that the global helium shortage is far from a short-term issue and represents the most severe supply crunch in two decades.
As a leader in industrial gases, Air Liquide counts helium—a high-barrier specialty product—among its key offerings. Together with peers Linde and Air Products, these three companies dominate the global helium market. However, their resource bases differ significantly. Air Liquide’s primary helium resources are located in the Middle East, where it has deep technical and quota-based cooperation with Qatar in helium extraction from natural gas.
On October 18th and 19th, Iran’s attack on Ras Laffan Industrial City in Qatar paralyzed multiple production lines. Given the extreme complexity of liquefied helium equipment, full recovery is estimated to take three to five years. With the Strait of Hormuz currently blocked, large stockpiles of liquid helium remain stranded. Liquid helium is difficult to store long-term; storage tanks have a limited holding period of around 40 days, during which a small amount gradually evaporates daily. If stocks in the Persian Gulf cannot be moved, they will eventually be entirely depleted.
Qatar has been supplying over half of China’s helium imports, making this primary import channel effectively unavailable. Compounding the problem, Russia announced export controls on helium on April 14th, set to remain in place until the end of 2027, with China included among the restricted countries. This casts uncertainty over China’s second-largest import source.
Against this backdrop, other majors such as Linde and Air Products—whose resource bases are mainly in the U.S. and Algeria and thus less affected—have collectively raised prices. Domestic prices in China have surged toward the 1,000 yuan mark with little room for adjustment. Clearly, helium will remain in tight balance or even be subject to rationing for a considerable period.
The helium supply crunch mainly affects high-end manufacturing, with the semiconductor industry hit hardest. Sectors such as healthcare (MRI), nuclear fusion, quantum computing, and aerospace also face risks of price hikes and supply disruption.
Back in the spring of 2022, several top Chinese universities and research institutions encountered an unusual problem: cryogenic experimental equipment repeatedly shut down. The cause was not equipment failure or power shortages, but a cutoff in liquid helium supply. Within a few months, the price of liquid helium soared from 80 yuan per liter to 400 yuan. Some labs were forced to dismantle systems temporarily to recover and recycle helium that was normally reused, just to extend operations by a few more days.
During the same period, domestic semiconductor firms, aerospace manufacturers, and medical imaging equipment producers felt similar pressure. Cooling systems for MRI machines, vacuum processes in chip manufacturing, and test platforms for liquid hydrogen rocket engines—all these cutting-edge industries rely heavily on this colorless, odorless gas.
Helium scarcity is not new to China, but that year, many realized for the first time how a nation’s high-tech system could be constrained by a single gas—a feeling of being strangled by a “gaseous rare earth.” People began to ask: What exactly is helium? Why has it become a hidden battlefield in international competition? Is China still short of helium today?
Helium occurs extremely rarely in nature. On Earth, it is mainly a byproduct of radioactive decay of uranium and thorium in underground rock formations. Accumulated over hundreds of millions of years, it is trapped in a limited number of natural gas fields. Globally, there are very few exploitable high-concentration helium fields—primarily located in the central U.S., Qatar, Russia’s Siberia, and Algeria. Unlike oil, which is widely traded and abundant, helium is more like a “rare strategic gas” confined to geological crevices.
Crucially, helium cannot be synthesized artificially nor stored long-term. It is extremely light and, once leaked, escapes into space forever. The helium humans can use comes only from finite underground reserves. This means that if one country controls the resources or supply chain, others are left dependent.
For decades, the global helium industry has been highly concentrated and unipolar. The U.S. has dominated most aspects—extraction, purification, transportation, and even pricing. During the Cold War, this control attracted little attention, as helium remained hidden within research and military systems, unlike oil which affects daily life. But in the 21st century, helium’s strategic importance has risen sharply. All technologies requiring ultra-low temperature environments—from chip manufacturing and nuclear fusion to quantum computing and rocket propulsion—depend on it. Helium has become the indispensable “cooling blood” at the foundation of modern technology.
For China, this “invisible shackle” arrived quietly yet proved critically constraining. Over the past two decades, China’s research and technology systems advanced rapidly—establishing independent capacity in chipmaking, space launches, and MRI equipment production. Yet helium long remained import-dependent. Thus, a question seldom raised publicly came to the fore: How can such a minor gas sway the technological fate of a major nation?
For a long time, the U.S. controlled over 90% of global helium supply. During the Cold War, the U.S. established a massive helium reserve in Amarillo, Texas—officially named the Federal Helium Reserve, but known in the industry as the “helium bank.” For decades, the U.S. extracted and stored helium from natural gas. This reserve not only served NASA, the military, and tech firms but also acted as a “central bank” for global helium pricing. When other countries bought helium, the U.S. could control the valve at any time, turning an inert gas into an inert yet dangerous strategic weapon.
Before the 2010s, most of China’s annual helium consumption relied on imports. Any U.S. restriction on exports or equipment could mean a supply cutoff for domestic chip plants, medical device factories, and aerospace programs. This dependency, while abstract in concept, was concrete in impact: a single cylinder of helium going out of stock could halt a chip factory; an MRI machine losing cooling could be rendered useless. Even if helium accounted for less than 0.01% of a product’s total cost, without it, that tiny percentage represented a 100% strategic veto.
Chinese researchers often had to secure liquid helium months in advance, stockpiling it like emergency rations. Compounding the challenge, helium cannot be stored long-term like oil—it slowly escapes from containers. Even if you had reserves, you couldn’t hold onto them for long. Thus, “helium shortage” became a hidden anxiety within China’s tech sector. On the surface, the country raced to catch up in lithography machines and chips, but at the foundational level of energy and gases, it remained dependent.
Over the past decade, however, China has quietly been making moves behind the scenes. Real changes have taken place far from the headlines, where researchers and engineers focused on basic resource development. The first step was resource identification—searching for helium within China’s borders. Helium often occurs as a trace companion in natural gas, previously overlooked. Starting in 2018, Chinese geological teams reanalyzed gas compositions in the Tarim, Ordos, and Sichuan basins, discovering several gas fields with helium concentrations between 0.05% and 0.2%—economically viable for extraction.
Regions such as Turpan-Hami and Junggar in Xinjiang, and Anyue in Sichuan, originally known as natural gas bases, emerged as potential helium sources. The next challenge was technical: extracting helium from natural gas. Helium molecules, with a radius of only 0.1 nanometers, are among the smallest of all elements, making them extremely difficult to capture with conventional separation equipment. Isolating helium from natural gas is far more challenging than extracting gold from ore.
Chinese research institutions and companies collaborated to overcome these barriers, advancing adsorption separation, cryogenic condensation, and membrane separation technologies. Through repeated experimentation, they achieved stable industrial-scale helium extraction from natural gas by around 2020. This meant China could not only “find” helium but also “capture” it.
By 2023, China had built multiple industrial helium extraction facilities. Sites in Hami (Xinjiang), Luzhou (Sichuan), and Ordos (Inner Mongolia) began producing domestic liquid helium. By 2025, China’s annual helium output exceeded 3 million cubic meters, marking a strategic leap from zero to stable production.
The final step was building a complete industrial chain. With equipment localization advancing, helium extraction plants were established in Hami, Luzhou, and Ordos. Domestic liquid helium tanks, cryogenic transport vehicles, and storage systems went into mass production. A full supply chain—from gas source to storage, transport, and end-use—was finally formed.
This represented a historic turnaround for a country long plagued by helium shortages. It was a silent countermove. While global attention remained fixed on rare earths, lithium, and chips, China quietly built its own “helium bank.”
Observers often focus on rare earths, a long-standing Chinese strength, while overlooking helium’s symmetrical strategic role. Both hold a similar power—a 0.01% veto over 100% of certain technologies. For years, China controlled the upstream rare earth industry, while the U.S. dominated helium and key equipment. If China played the “rare earth card,” the U.S. could tighten the “helium valve,” creating mutual constraint.
In high-tech supply chains, rare earths control the materials end—determining magnetic properties, energy density, and luminescence—while helium controls the temperature end, enabling extreme precision in manufacturing and cooling capacity. One comes from the earth’s crust, the other from the skies—two invisible pillars supporting modern industry. But as China’s helium industry took shape, this balance began to shift. For the first time, both key pillars were held by the same hand.
With the helium constraint loosening, China gained the ability to control both “materials and gases” in the resource game. When neither is subject to external control, a nation’s technological cycle becomes truly closed. As some industry insiders note, “Helium is not about catching up; it’s about breathing. With helium, Chinese technology can truly breathe.”
From a resource security perspective, this means China’s high-tech system has finally gained “autonomous cooling” capability. More broadly, it marks a shift from raw material dependency to systemic self-sufficiency. As foundational elements like rare earths, lithium, and helium gradually come under domestic control, Chinese manufacturing is no longer just about “being able to make” but “being able to make stably.”
Many see technological independence as merely an economic security issue. In reality, it is more like a civilization’s self-defense. In the language of globalization, “dependence” is often framed as cooperation. But when one side can shut off the valve at any time, the relationship is not partnership but patienthood. This was China’s long-standing dilemma with helium: an industrial giant relying on an invisible tube for breath.
Helium independence did not come because the state suddenly recognized its strategic importance, but because countless researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs shouldered an “invisible front” in unseen corners. They never made headlines, yet they reinforced the most vulnerable layer of the nation’s technological shield. That layer is now thicker, allowing China to compete in future industries without depending on external gas supply.
The significance of helium independence lies not only in supply security but also in a psychological shift. In the past, China reacted to shortages—of chips, equipment, or gases—by seeking alternatives. But the helium example shows that seemingly unbreakable dependencies can be overcome through sustained effort and patience. Helium has thus become a symbol: enabling China to move from “passive breathing” to “autonomous breathing.”
Challenges remain—liquid helium equipment needs optimization, recycling rates must improve, and international pricing power is yet to be established. But the most critical step has been taken: the invisible chain has been broken. China can now decide when to breathe, and how deeply.
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