Since early 2017, helium supply has fluctuated from a slight surplus from the large Qatar 2 production fully onstream, to in-balance with the logistics disruption of the Qatar blockage in June 2017, to tight supply beginning spring 2018 when a series of planned and unplanned outages affected major global supply sources.
Helium is a global commodity delivered though a complex global supply chain where diversity of sourcing and reliability of sourcing operations is the driver affecting level of helium supply and service by major gas companies. Worldwide helium supply in 2018 will be about 6.2 billion cubic feet (bcf). The worldwide helium market demand in 2018 is about 6.2 bcf, as shown in Figure 1. This is a growth of about 400 million cubic feet (mmcf), 2% per year, from 2014. This demand could have been slightly higher if global supply had not experienced the plant outages.
Figure 1 shows the complexity of supplying helium, which is perishable under very high vacuum at very cold temperatures, from a very few specialized companies with a few remotely located production plants for delivery to hundreds of thousands of customers. We predict global growth at just over 2% per year for the next five years. The world’s helium demand-supply relationship is predicted to be tight until as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) depletes the private inventory by 2021 and new planned sources, Qatar 3 and 4 and the Russian Gazprom and Irkutsk projects, come on-stream by 2021. Qatar 4 does not have a start date at this time.
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