Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lats podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Joe Wisenthal and.
Speaker 3: I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: Tracy, one of the things that have been learning over
Speaker 2: the last few weeks is that a lot more than
Speaker 2: oil comes through No for real, Like you know, some
Speaker 2: onegether's war breaking out in the Middle East. You just
Speaker 2: think about oil, right, and then that's probably actually where
Speaker 2: my mind would typically stop. What's the price of oil?
Speaker 2: And we all are watching the price of oil, but
Speaker 2: there are a lot of other things that are sourced
Speaker 2: from the region that are of critical important I'm not
Speaker 2: joking like I'm just saying.
Speaker 3: Like I'm laughing, because we have one of those things
Speaker 3: floating between us. So, speaking of stuff that comes out
Speaker 3: of the Gulf region, here's one of those things.
Speaker 2: Not listeners can't see it.
Speaker 3: Not the aluminum itself, although probably aluminum also comes out
Speaker 3: of the Gulf, but helium.
Speaker 2: Tracy's holding a helium balloon. She went out and got
Speaker 2: a prop.
Speaker 3: I didn't one of our lovely producers did. I have
Speaker 3: to say, I haven't held a balloon for a long time,
Speaker 3: and it's surprisingly entertaining.
Speaker 2: So okay, while you hold on to it, I'll go
Speaker 2: a little bit further, which is I feel bad for
Speaker 2: the people in helium because my understanding is that the
Speaker 2: helium has some pretty important industrial properties. There's not a
Speaker 2: lot of substitutes for it. But someone says helium, and like, oh,
Speaker 2: the clowns are going to be able to make their
Speaker 2: funny voices, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Any chance we have to actually bring one of the
Speaker 3: commodities that we talk about on the show into the studio,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna seeze. So fear is some helium.
Speaker 2: Well, look, the fact that the balloon is floating is
Speaker 2: an indicator of the fact that it must have some
Speaker 2: interesting properties as an element that perhaps have other applications.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean it tells you something about
Speaker 2: it as an elementary.
Speaker 3: Well, it's funny you mentioned that, because initially I was
Speaker 3: gonna take this balloon and you know, do the thing
Speaker 3: breathe than the helium and have the funny voice. Well,
Speaker 3: I thought for an audio medium, maybe it would work.
Speaker 3: But then in the course of researching on helium, I
Speaker 3: read about apparently it comes partially from radioactive decay, and
Speaker 3: so I thought, well, maybe maybe I don't want to
Speaker 3: be breathing in the helium, although I also read that
Speaker 3: it's non toxic, so I don't know. We need to
Speaker 3: talk about what helium actually is. Clearly, that's right.
Speaker 2: And we've been getting requests for a Helium episode ever
Speaker 2: since there was a headline out today Cutter some Helium
Speaker 2: production that is not gonna sit one of those force
Speaker 2: measures or something like that, I don't know whatever or
Speaker 2: something not coming out. Anyway, there's been a lot of
Speaker 2: requests for a Helium episode. We've never done one. Incidentally,
Speaker 2: years ago, I used to lift weights with this guy
Speaker 2: in the East Village who's like sort of an entrepreneur
Speaker 2: and Helium filled with no but he was in Helium
Speaker 2: among all those things. He's one of these guys that
Speaker 2: has his like finger hands and everything, and he also
Speaker 2: had like a Helium venture and he's like, oh, you
Speaker 2: got to talk to my friend one day. You guys
Speaker 2: should do an episode on Helium. And then I got
Speaker 2: connected with our guests who are about to introduce a
Speaker 2: second and I said, hey, do you know this guy
Speaker 2: in the East Village Because okay, maybe like not everyone
Speaker 2: in Canada knows each other, but everyone in the helium industry.
Speaker 2: I must certainly knows each other. He's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: of course I know that guy who used to live
Speaker 2: away to it.
Speaker 3: It does seem to be a small there's a traded industry,
Speaker 3: which is why we're talking about it today, which is.
Speaker 2: Why we're talking about today anyway. What is helium? Why
Speaker 2: is it important? Where do we get it? Why is
Speaker 2: it impaired right now? Many questions that people at answered
Speaker 2: very excited to say. We do have the perfect guest.
Speaker 2: We're going to be speaking with Nick Snyder, founder and
Speaker 2: CEO of North American Helium, which minds and sells helium
Speaker 2: out of Canada. So Nick, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: coming on odd lots.
Speaker 4: Joe Tracy thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: How annoyed argues that like that we brought up balloon,
Speaker 2: they just like, oh, I have the helium company, and
Speaker 2: like everyone, ninety nine percent of the time, people are
Speaker 2: just gonna think that's like the thing for balloons, and
Speaker 2: therefore it can't be that important.
Speaker 4: You know, I've gotten used to it. I've got young
Speaker 4: kids and they had to exercise school asking them what
Speaker 4: their parents did, and they said that I blow up balloons.
Speaker 4: So the teachers definitely think I'm a clown and we
Speaker 4: all get used to it.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, why don't we ask in all seriousness what
Speaker 3: are the industrial applications for helium beyond entertaining us in
Speaker 3: balloon form?
Speaker 4: So the biggest demand source, which you've probably seen in
Speaker 4: the news a little bit because of the events in Iran,
Speaker 4: is manufacturing semiconductors, and beyond that, one of the fastest
Speaker 4: growing end uses is for launching rockets for space exploration.
Speaker 4: And then there's a number of pretty durable, long standing
Speaker 4: uses including leak detection for everything from every cell and
Speaker 4: an electric battery to all sorts of complex machinery manufacturing,
Speaker 4: fiber optics, titanium MRIs and NMR for drug discovery. It's
Speaker 4: pretty well used across all of technology, all right.
Speaker 2: So what is it about the element helium that gives
Speaker 2: it these properties such that it is useful? Well, you
Speaker 2: described as a fairly wide range of industrial applications.
Speaker 4: So what makes it so useful is it's got three
Speaker 4: or four things going for it that are completely unique.
Speaker 4: One is that it has the lowest boiling point of
Speaker 4: anything in nature. So liquid helium is about four degrees kelvin.
Speaker 4: I don't have my uh, you know, conversion in front
Speaker 4: of me. I think that's negative two hundred and seventy
Speaker 4: something degrees celsius. So it's the coldest substance on Earth,
Speaker 4: and that's really important for any sort of superconducting magnets
Speaker 4: to the most.
Speaker 2: Google says that's negative four hundred and fifty two degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's quite cold.
Speaker 4: We're Canadian companyelium.
Speaker 2: Kelvin is our common language. We don't have to fight
Speaker 2: fahrenheit versus celsia's here. We're gonna class pans with kelvin anyway,
Speaker 2: keep going.
Speaker 4: So just the boiling point alone makes it very unique
Speaker 4: and important. So if you want to have something very cold,
Speaker 4: and that's primarily low temperature physics and superconductors, you need
Speaker 4: to use liquid helium for that. But the boiling point
Speaker 4: is also important for launching rockets because if you're launching rockets,
Speaker 4: you can't pump the liquid rocket fuel into the engine
Speaker 4: fast enough because the volume is so large, so you
Speaker 4: need to pressurize those rockets, and that is primarily done
Speaker 4: with helium because it is light weight. But also it's
Speaker 4: the only substance that is non reactive that remains a
Speaker 4: gas at the temperature of liquid oxygen or liquid kerosene.
Speaker 4: So it also, in addition to being a very cold substance,
Speaker 4: is a liquid. It's also it's a great heat transfer medium.
Speaker 4: So if you think about the fiberglass insulation in your
Speaker 4: walls is a good insulator, and the copper pot you
Speaker 4: cook eggs in is a good heat transfer medium. No
Speaker 4: one really thinks about that with gases, but helium is
Speaker 4: very good at transferring heat. So if you were a
Speaker 4: deep sea diver that they breathe the helium oxygen mix
Speaker 4: mixture so that they don't get nitrogen narcosis when they're
Speaker 4: in that high helium atmosphere, they have to heat their
Speaker 4: habitat to about ninety eight degrees or they'll start shivering.
Speaker 4: Because nitrogen is a very good insulator and helium is
Speaker 4: a very good conductor of heat, and that becomes important
Speaker 4: in semiconductor manufacturing because as they're doing the lithography process,
Speaker 4: they need a carrier gas that is a small molecule,
Speaker 4: and helium is the smallest molecule in nature. That's also
Speaker 4: something that can transfer heat away to avoid errors, and
Speaker 4: also is non reactive. So really what makes helium demand
Speaker 4: so durable in some of these applications, is that you're
Speaker 4: using more than one of the unique attributes of the molecule.
Speaker 3: Wait, just to be clear on semiconductor lithography, the actual etching,
Speaker 3: how is the helium used in that process? Is it
Speaker 3: just like in the environment around to keep it cool,
Speaker 3: or like, how is it being deployed.
Speaker 5: So I'm not an expert here, I don't want to
Speaker 5: get out of my depth, but basically, you know, they
Speaker 5: have a light source and a mask and then they
Speaker 5: have to deposit something on there that.
Speaker 4: Is vapor deposition. They need to carry your gas for
Speaker 4: whatever they're depositing on there, and they need that to
Speaker 4: be you know, something with a very high heat transfer
Speaker 4: rate and also a small molecule. They use it in
Speaker 4: a bunch of other parts of the semiconductor process, but
Speaker 4: a lot of them like cooling the backside of the
Speaker 4: wafer you can recycle. It's the lithography process where they're
Speaker 4: essentially polluting the helium with other volatile compounds. That's what's
Speaker 4: causing demand to grow so quickly in semiconductors. And I've
Speaker 4: seen estimates that the new leading edge chips use ten
Speaker 4: times more helium per ship than older technologies, So the
Speaker 4: helium demand from that sector is growing. It roughly double
Speaker 4: the volume of silicon from that sector is growing.
Speaker 3: Okay, and I feel very after school special asking this
Speaker 3: next question while next to a balloon. But where does
Speaker 3: helium actually come from?
Speaker 4: Helium is only created on Earth by, as you said,
Speaker 4: radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. Helium itself is not radioactive,
Speaker 4: and divers can breathe it as long as there's oxygen
Speaker 4: in there as well. What's interesting about helium is that,
Speaker 4: unlike any other critical mineral, once you use it, it
Speaker 4: leaves the atmosphere, so you can't go get it out
Speaker 4: of a landfill after the fact. So that means that
Speaker 4: you can only find helium on Earth underground where it's
Speaker 4: been trapped. And the generation time scales are roughly in
Speaker 4: order of magnetudes larger than for oil and gas. So
Speaker 4: an oil and gas deposit might have taken ten million
Speaker 4: years to be created. In helium, you're talking about hundreds
Speaker 4: of millions of years because it's a very slow process.
Speaker 2: So we're going to get to North American helium and
Speaker 2: the deposits that you have access to. But there's helium deposits,
Speaker 2: and then helium also e merges as a byproduct of
Speaker 2: natural gas. So talk to us about how helium comes
Speaker 2: out of the grown Typically, you know, we're talking about
Speaker 2: the Middle East, somewhere Tatar there's a lot of gas
Speaker 2: versus say, where you're mining healing, and then we'll get
Speaker 2: into some of these different processes.
Speaker 4: So that's really primarily a function of exploration. Okay, helium
Speaker 4: is much more rare than natural gas, but most of
Speaker 4: the world's helium supply comes as a byproduct of natural
Speaker 4: gas because there's been a huge amount of exploration drilling
Speaker 4: for natural gas, so that's where they've found it. And
Speaker 4: there's one gigantic field in the US Mid Continent called
Speaker 4: the Hugoton that's been on production for one hundred years.
Speaker 4: That's what we use to originally fill the Federal Helium Reserve.
Speaker 4: The field and cutter which they share with Iran. Although
Speaker 4: Iran is not able to extract helium that has one
Speaker 4: twentieth of one percent helium in it, so it's a
Speaker 4: very very small quantity. But because they're doing so much
Speaker 4: pre treatment, because there's hydrogen sulfide in the gas, and
Speaker 4: because the scale of their LNG facility is so large.
Speaker 4: That's the largest single source of helium in the world.
Speaker 2: This is really helpful because I just sort of, you know,
Speaker 2: when we do these things like where's that fane come from,
Speaker 2: it's like all these byproducts. So I assumed that helium
Speaker 2: was yet just like another byproduct thing that shows up
Speaker 2: anytime you're looking for natural gas. But it sounds like, no,
Speaker 2: the reason it's there is just because there's been a
Speaker 2: lot of exploration in that area and they found helium.
Speaker 2: But that it's not inevitable that anywhere you have natural gas,
Speaker 2: I're going to find helium.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yea.
Speaker 3: So actually, on that note, so if I go exploring
Speaker 3: for nat gas and I happen to find a helium deposit, like,
Speaker 3: what happens to that helium if I decide that I
Speaker 3: want to monetize it, Like, how do I actually extract
Speaker 3: it out of the ground? How do I store it?
Speaker 3: Do I set up a helium facility right next to
Speaker 3: where the deposit actually is, or do I move it
Speaker 3: somewhere else? What's the next step in the process.
Speaker 4: The way that the gas separation process works is for
Speaker 4: the most part, you're actually separating everything except for the
Speaker 4: helium because helium is a small, non reactive molecule, you
Speaker 4: can't just take that out. So for the most part,
Speaker 4: helium always shows up with nitrogen, so you'd already have
Speaker 4: a high nitrogen content in the gas, and then you're
Speaker 4: going to remove the nitrogen and the methane and be
Speaker 4: left with the helium, which you can then purify. And
Speaker 4: there's really only a couple of fields in the world.
Speaker 4: There's one field in Algeria that's been on production for
Speaker 4: a long time and it's falling off. There's one field
Speaker 4: in Siberia. There's the field in the Middle East, the
Speaker 4: field that's been depleting for a long time in the
Speaker 4: US Mid Continent. But it is really quite rare. And
Speaker 4: if you think about what are the ingredients you need
Speaker 4: for this, you need to have an area with uranium
Speaker 4: and thorium, and we sort of know where that is
Speaker 4: because the US and the Russians during the Cold War
Speaker 4: looked all over the world for uranium. And you need
Speaker 4: to have an area where you've got a sedimentary basin,
Speaker 4: where you're going to have traditional oil reservoir rocks. You're
Speaker 4: sort of looking for a sandstone, and in general, you're
Speaker 4: looking for an area where there aren't any mountains because
Speaker 4: it's a small molecule that wants to escape to the surface.
Speaker 4: So if you are in a tectonic area, that's going
Speaker 4: to be a big problem for you.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. So the existence of mountains implies I hadn't
Speaker 2: thought about that at all. I would say, oh, mountains,
Speaker 2: that's great. Is probably more deeply buried, less place for
Speaker 2: it to escape. But the existence of mountains implies tectonic activity,
Speaker 2: and that's how you get leaked. Super interesting. Do they
Speaker 2: have it in Kazakhson? I know they have a lot
Speaker 2: of uranium. There is there helium in kazakhs On.
Speaker 4: I think there's a little bit of helium content in
Speaker 4: one of the stranded gas fields there. Certainly there's no
Speaker 4: production there, Okay, And again you know the the LNG
Speaker 4: operation and cutter is somewhat unique with a very small
Speaker 4: helium content. If you were to go drill for helium
Speaker 4: in North America and you're not going to have one
Speaker 4: of the world's largest energy complexes there, generally one third
Speaker 4: of one percent is sort of considered an economic cutoff
Speaker 4: for the helium downtown.
Speaker 3: Is it true? We used to have a strategic a
Speaker 3: national helium reserve. I can't believe we don't have a
Speaker 3: strategic pork reserve, but there was a federal helium reserve once.
Speaker 4: Upon a time when our government was very foresighted. We
Speaker 4: did build a helium reserve during the Cold War, which
Speaker 4: was a brilliant idea, both because helium is an important
Speaker 4: thing to have, but also because that gas would have
Speaker 4: been vented otherwise. And you know a good example of
Speaker 4: this is in Algeria, they have one field with helium
Speaker 4: content that mixes in with everything else. If they're making
Speaker 4: LNG from the gas stream in Algeria, then they can
Speaker 4: recover the helium. But if they're putting it into the
Speaker 4: pipeline to Europe, which unfortunately is where the majority of
Speaker 4: it's going right now because gas prices are very high
Speaker 4: in Europe, it can't be recovered. And that helium when
Speaker 4: you turn on your stove is just going to escape
Speaker 4: into the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Oh that's really interesting. So even if you don't have
Speaker 2: a market or an easy way to sell it at
Speaker 2: the time, what the strategic reserve did was allow us
Speaker 2: to capture something that would have been otherwise lost permanently
Speaker 2: had we not had this thing. So tell us the
Speaker 2: story because I'm evidently we don't have it anymore. What
Speaker 2: was in it? Where was it and where did it go?
Speaker 2: Who do we sell it to? What happened?
Speaker 4: So it was primarily the helium that was the Hugoton field,
Speaker 4: which is this very large field across Texas and Oklahoma
Speaker 4: and parts of Kansas.
Speaker 3: That's close to Amarillo, isn't it.
Speaker 4: So the field is very large. The gas production from that,
Speaker 4: we started recovering helium. We were always the Saudi Arabia
Speaker 4: of helium, if you will. You know. A side note
Speaker 4: there is that the Hinden Bird was designed for helium,
Speaker 4: and the US Senate blocked export of helium for military
Speaker 4: reasons to Germany, and that's why they filled it up
Speaker 4: with hydrogen instead. So this has been going on for
Speaker 4: a while, and we talk about it being a small
Speaker 4: molecule and difficult to trap underground. A good example of
Speaker 4: that is when it was first found in Kansas. Originally,
Speaker 4: helium was discovered by looking at the sun during an
Speaker 4: eclipse and someone was able to see from the spectral
Speaker 4: lines that there's another element out here. And then they
Speaker 4: found an inert gas well in Kansas and they were
Speaker 4: able to distill the helium basically by putting the gas
Speaker 4: through a bunch of really narrow glass tubes, and the
Speaker 4: helium will go through the glass because it's such a
Speaker 4: small molecule and that's how they were able to distill it.
Speaker 4: So anyways, we built the world's only helium reserve during
Speaker 4: the Cold War, and this is something that the science
Speaker 4: community was very excited about because they recognized that this
Speaker 4: is really important for a bunch of science and physics,
Speaker 4: but more importantly, think about the long term. We're living
Speaker 4: in interesting times in many ways, but an interesting time
Speaker 4: if you think very long term in terms of the
Speaker 4: last hundred years have seen drilling for natural gas all
Speaker 4: over the place, and particularly for conventional deposits. It's important
Speaker 4: to understand you can't find helium and economic quantities in
Speaker 4: unconventional resources like shale. So prior to our company, the
Speaker 4: last new discovery of helium that was commercialized in North
Speaker 4: America's fifty years ago, the oil and gas companies aren't
Speaker 4: looking for these conventional fields anymore. But the American Physical
Speaker 4: Society got very upset when we talked about selling off
Speaker 4: the helium reserve, and they said, basically, this is a
Speaker 4: molecule that's only getting more important. We're finding more and
Speaker 4: more uses for it, and if you think about today,
Speaker 4: what are some future uses. They're using this for quantum
Speaker 4: computing to keep things very cold, they're using it for
Speaker 4: nuclear fusion, for the superconducting magnets. They're now using it
Speaker 4: in I think X Energy just filed for an IPO.
Speaker 4: Those are helium cooled fission reactors that they're building SMRs,
Speaker 4: because like if you think about Fukushima, that was a
Speaker 4: water cooled reactor and the water got hot and then
Speaker 4: the water turned into steam and it got so hot
Speaker 4: that the steam separated into hydrogen and oxygen and then
Speaker 4: things blew up. But because helium is such a good
Speaker 4: heat transfer medium, you can use helium as the primary
Speaker 4: loop there in these reactors and it makes it passively safe.
Speaker 4: So the physics community was very up in arms when
Speaker 4: we decided to sell this off because they said, you know,
Speaker 4: what happens fifty years from now when we need this
Speaker 4: for space exploration and quantum computing and everything else, And
Speaker 4: there's no one drilling for conventional gas anymore. So you know,
Speaker 4: that's sort of the issue there, and you know, we
Speaker 4: can get into why we sold it off, it won't
Speaker 4: be a terrible hold on it.
Speaker 2: Where did it go? Because I can't imagine, like, have
Speaker 2: we bought the strategic helium reserve. Let's just go make
Speaker 2: a bunch of balloons, like I assume that didn't happened.
Speaker 2: So who bought it and what did they do with it?
Speaker 4: So we actually stockpiled two things during the Cold War
Speaker 4: helium and ten ten is also used for semiconductors. We
Speaker 4: sold them both off prior to right now when we
Speaker 4: started building semiconductor fabs in the US. So that's sort
Speaker 4: of a not a great choice necessarily with regard to
Speaker 4: the helium reserve. When they originally started, they took the
Speaker 4: helium out of the gas stream, and to your point, Tracy,
Speaker 4: they put it into an old natural gas field in Amarillo.
Speaker 4: So that's why the helium reserve was there, and they
Speaker 4: filled that up. But the government never appropriated funds to
Speaker 4: pay for the helium. So the Bureau of Land Management
Speaker 4: or their predecessor, basically owed the government three hundred million
Speaker 4: dollars for this because no funds were appropriated, and that
Speaker 4: three hundred million dollars was accruing interest to the point
Speaker 4: where I think in nineteen ninety six, Newt Gingrich got
Speaker 4: into power and it was time to start talking about
Speaker 4: privatizing things. And Christopher Cox went to the House floor
Speaker 4: and basically said, you know, do you know the government,
Speaker 4: this dumb government has one point four billion dollars of
Speaker 4: party balloon debt. And a bill was quickly passed and
Speaker 4: you know, signed by Clinton, and we decided to sell
Speaker 4: the whole thing off. The original plan, I believe, was
Speaker 4: to sell it off in equal parts over thirty years
Speaker 4: for exactly one point four billion, with no regard to
Speaker 4: the market, just to pay off the government so called
Speaker 4: party balloon debt. And the physics community was up in
Speaker 4: arms about this. But you know, they don't have that
Speaker 4: many senators.
Speaker 3: That's amazing, and I feel like we could do a
Speaker 3: whole episode just on the helium reserve. But serious question,
Speaker 3: I guess, or maybe a related question, how difficult is
Speaker 3: helium to store? Because we're used to you know, maybe
Speaker 3: you go into the party balloon shop in the Party
Speaker 3: Balloon district of downtown New York and you see canisters
Speaker 3: of helium gas lying there. But on the other hand,
Speaker 3: I imagine you're talking about the world's smallest molecule. As
Speaker 3: you've said, it must escape quite easily.
Speaker 4: So if you decide to get into the party balloon
Speaker 4: business and you're going to take over where Party City
Speaker 4: left off. You know, by the way, the only time
Speaker 4: people usually friends on the street bringing up helium with
Speaker 4: me is every time there's a helium shortage, and we're
Speaker 4: now looking at probably the fifth in the last twenty years,
Speaker 4: party City goes bankrupt. And that's the industry. But if
Speaker 4: you wanted to get into that industry, and you wanted
Speaker 4: to get canisters of helium, and I hope, being an
Speaker 4: honest person, you would get canisters of pure helium, because
Speaker 4: I've heard a lot about people, you know, going fifty
Speaker 4: to fifty in your balloons don't stay in the air
Speaker 4: as long as you remember them when you were a kid. Candle,
Speaker 4: the helium will be leaking around the threads of the
Speaker 4: valve a little bit each day. And the world trade
Speaker 4: of helium is actually done in the form of a
Speaker 4: liquid Where a liquid helium ISO container can be on
Speaker 4: a ship. It can hold roughly five times more than
Speaker 4: a what used to be called a tube trailer of
Speaker 4: you know, sort of a two foot in diameter forty
Speaker 4: foot long tube, and you'll see these on the highway
Speaker 4: where there's about ten of them stacked on the back
Speaker 4: of a tractor trailer. That that's a steel tube trailer. Now,
Speaker 4: because of the hydrogen industry, there is carbon fiber overwrapped
Speaker 4: trailers that can hold about a third as much as
Speaker 4: a liquid helium container, So it changes the transportation differential
Speaker 4: a little bit, and that's what we use. But it
Speaker 4: shipped around the world as a liquid, and as a
Speaker 4: liquid it is perishable, So that's part of the reason
Speaker 4: that whenever you know the sort of timeline here is
Speaker 4: I have nothing interesting to say about geopolitics, but the
Speaker 4: Kataris have said they are going to wait until hostilities
Speaker 4: have ceased and then they will restart LNG production, and
Speaker 4: I read that it'll take three or four weeks or something.
Speaker 4: The helium industry is going to take longer than that
Speaker 4: to recover from them, because there's only about three thousand
Speaker 4: of these liquid helium containers in the world. They're highly
Speaker 4: highly specialized because you're talking about taking a huge amount
Speaker 4: by weight of liquid helium, which is at four degrees
Speaker 4: kelvin and putting it in a container where it's essentially
Speaker 4: a very fancy thermost but this has to be hardy
Speaker 4: enough that you can put it on a truck and
Speaker 4: put it on a ship, but it's warming up the
Speaker 4: whole time. And the very best containers can hold the
Speaker 4: helium for about forty five days before the pressure gets
Speaker 4: too high and they'll essentially vent themselves. So it makes
Speaker 4: it very perishable, and it makes the containers very important.
Speaker 4: Where I would assume that the Katari LNG facilities had
Speaker 4: filled a lot of liquid helium containers that are now
Speaker 4: stuck somewhere, yeah, and those are slowly warming up. And
Speaker 4: on the other hand, to deal with a crisis like this,
Speaker 4: the big industrial gas companies are now going to have
Speaker 4: to scramble to move containers to other sources to try
Speaker 4: and get helium out of storage where they've built some
Speaker 4: private story since the federal reserve is now essentially gone,
Speaker 4: and that's going to cause a lot of problems because
Speaker 4: it's just a very limited supply of these.
Speaker 2: I just want to say, and I really mean this
Speaker 2: with no offense, but anytime that we have a guest
Speaker 2: who sort of is talking a lot about science and technology,
Speaker 2: I do a little bit of live fact checking guy
Speaker 2: like look up all these things, and it's like, Yep,
Speaker 2: we really did have something called the Helium Privatization Act
Speaker 2: in twenty sixteen, just about one point party billion out
Speaker 2: and party balloon debt. It really is perceived to be
Speaker 2: important in quantum computing. It really is perceived to be
Speaker 2: important in small modular reactors. So I just, you know,
Speaker 2: for the listeners out there, because I can't you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know anything about any of this stuff. This
Speaker 2: all seems to check out. Helium seems to be pretty important.
Speaker 2: Now here's something I've learned. I have learned over the years,
Speaker 2: which is that anytime we are talking about niche commodities,
Speaker 2: it's often like harder to find anything resembling spot prices
Speaker 2: at all, including a lot of the rare earths and stuff.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you'll see these tech but they're like ancient or
Speaker 2: not up today or whatever or whatever that maybe there
Speaker 2: was a futures market at one point but it like
Speaker 2: got discontinued in twenty eighteen or something. There's actually literally
Speaker 2: nothing on the terminal about helium pricing. And I tell
Speaker 2: us about why that is and how what is how
Speaker 2: transparent is the helium market and what is the cost
Speaker 2: of a ton of helium or whatever. What is the
Speaker 2: denomination of helium in terms of how much is sold
Speaker 2: in a chunk? Tell us about that market.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it's a pretty unique market. I mean, there
Speaker 4: used to be more markets like this, but companies like
Speaker 4: Bloomberg and many others, Yeah, help to make things a
Speaker 4: lot more efficient. In general, the price to the end user,
Speaker 4: it's considered to be about a six billion cubic foot
Speaker 4: per year market and worth about six billion dollars a year.
Speaker 4: So that implies about one thousand dollars per MCF to
Speaker 4: the end user. And you know that's mcf is a
Speaker 4: thousand cubic feet. That's the standard denomination that they use
Speaker 4: in natural gas, you know, So that implies that it's
Speaker 4: a dollar for one cubic foot. And since you insisted
Speaker 4: on bringing a helium balloon into the studio, I would
Speaker 4: fact check you and say, what did you pay for that? Oh?
Speaker 2: Well, I actually don't know, but definitely more than a dollar. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and definitely that's not a cubic foot.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm going to ask our producer and then he
Speaker 3: can tell us in a few minutes.
Speaker 2: But keep going while we wait for a response for
Speaker 2: our producer, what do you tell us about the current
Speaker 2: market environment and how twenty twenty six looks for twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five verse twenty sixteen, et cetera.
Speaker 4: So the market had been trending down since the last shortage,
Speaker 4: which ended in around twenty twenty two, when the Russians
Speaker 4: brought production online, and that was a bit of a
Speaker 4: surprise to the industry because a German firm, Lindy, had
Speaker 4: been involved with building the Russian facility. They're a more
Speaker 4: gas project which processes natural gas, liquids and other things
Speaker 4: out of a big gas stream and also recovers the
Speaker 4: helium from their Canda and Kubecta fields. And the general
Speaker 4: consensus because of the Ukraine War is that the Russians
Speaker 4: wouldn't be able to get that plant to run without
Speaker 4: the help of the Germans. And they started up the
Speaker 4: first train and had a very large fire, and they
Speaker 4: started up the second train and had a very large explosion.
Speaker 4: So everyone has sort of written that off. But they
Speaker 4: were able to get that production up and running and
Speaker 4: start bringing it into the market. There are sanctions on
Speaker 4: bringing liquid helium containers to Sanctions might not be the
Speaker 4: right word, but I believe there's a state Department restriction
Speaker 4: on taking liquid helium containers from the US to Russia
Speaker 4: because it's dual use, it could have a military application.
Speaker 4: There's also sanctions on taking Russian helium at all the
Speaker 4: places like Europe. So the Russians went into production and
Speaker 4: basically flooded the Chinese market and it sort of spread
Speaker 4: out from there a little bit. It's somewhat limited the
Speaker 4: impact they were able to have because of the lack
Speaker 4: of liquid helium containers the lack of end markets for them,
Speaker 4: but prices have been trending down. I will say, you know,
Speaker 4: an answer to your question, why isn't it obvious what
Speaker 4: the helium price is. There's a confidentiality clause in every
Speaker 4: helium contract, so we sell on long term contracts, primarily
Speaker 4: to the big industrial gas companies, but those are all confidential,
Speaker 4: and certainly from a commodity trader point of view, having
Speaker 4: an opaque market probably is you know, a pretty good things. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but maybe that originated with the fact that the government
Speaker 4: was selling the helium for exactly one point four billion
Speaker 4: and no one wanted to, you know, have a futures
Speaker 4: market there. But also, as you guys know, you know,
Speaker 4: futures markets sort of need to be deliverable, and there's
Speaker 4: no longer any sort of global hub. You could have. Potentially,
Speaker 4: when the Federal Reserve was a public facility where you
Speaker 4: could inject gas back into it, you could have built
Speaker 4: a futures market around that, but no one did.
Speaker 3: It kind of reminds me of plane delivery contracts, where
Speaker 3: you know, the announcement comes out and it's always at
Speaker 3: a list price. So like an airline buys one hundred
Speaker 3: million dollars worth of Boeing planes, but the contracts are
Speaker 3: so custom and opaque and individualized that like, no one
Speaker 3: really ever knows how.
Speaker 2: Much they serplane. That's super interesting.
Speaker 3: Our producer Dash, by the way, got back to us
Speaker 3: and he says the balloon costs nine dollars, which is
Speaker 3: more than I would have expected. So what do I
Speaker 3: know about balloons? First of all, from your vantage point
Speaker 3: in the market, what supply disruptions are you seeing right now?
Speaker 3: And then secondly, how long does it actually take those
Speaker 3: disruptions to work their way into the market and start
Speaker 3: to hit prices? Given that we just talked about how
Speaker 3: most of the stuff is selling on a very long
Speaker 3: term forward basis.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, the second part of your question is particularly germane.
Speaker 4: But you know, the Katari facilities in total, we're producing
Speaker 4: north of thirty percent of world helium supply. And given
Speaker 4: that there's no federal helium reserve anymore, and given that
Speaker 4: this is a perishable commodity essentially because it starts warming
Speaker 4: up once you fill a liquid helium container, that's a
Speaker 4: huge problem. The longer this goes on, it becomes more
Speaker 4: and more of a problem. But to your point on timing,
Speaker 4: there's a leading helium consultant who we've worked with for
Speaker 4: a long time who I think put it very well
Speaker 4: where he described the situation last week as it's like
Speaker 4: a tsunami where the water has already gone out, but
Speaker 4: we're all still on the beach and the wave hasn't
Speaker 4: hit yet, and the last cargoes that left Cutter are
Speaker 4: probably just now getting delivered to customers, so you know,
Speaker 4: the real problems are coming in the next month.
Speaker 2: This is how everyone, by the way, an Energy are
Speaker 2: thinking about this moment right now, because buy and large
Speaker 2: markets are up for oil, gas, et cetera. But maybe
Speaker 2: you know, not hyper catastrophic levels, and everyone's like this
Speaker 2: better open up soon because the water has come out,
Speaker 2: and we're going to have real problems the longer we
Speaker 2: have these disruptions. It's interesting too, like this idea that
Speaker 2: you know, here's something I wondered about, and it again
Speaker 2: relates to the some of the conversations we've had about
Speaker 2: rare earth's in the past. The nominal size of this
Speaker 2: market even right now does not sound very large. A
Speaker 2: six billion dollar global market. This is the same thing
Speaker 2: we talked to Haaveer Blase here at Bloomberg about rare earths.
Speaker 2: The total dollar amounts for this stuff are not that high.
Speaker 2: And it always makes me wonder does that impair exploration
Speaker 2: and production appetites that It's like, look, yeah, we could
Speaker 2: go looking for new fields, we could drill here, et cetera.
Speaker 2: But this just even in the best of times, is
Speaker 2: not going to be a great market. And so we have,
Speaker 2: like other things is on our mind to do. And
Speaker 2: I'm curious, like whether small nominal markets make it harder
Speaker 2: to mobilize capital.
Speaker 4: And you know, I don't know what the price of
Speaker 4: uranium is today, but that's a similar sized market. And
Speaker 4: you know what you see in these industries when prices
Speaker 4: you know, go up or there's a shortage is essentially
Speaker 4: people start doing exploration at the desk where they're saying,
Speaker 4: who almost found this in the past, because it's too
Speaker 4: expensive to go do it from first principles. If you
Speaker 4: think about the size of the oil and gas market,
Speaker 4: it's what hundreds of times larger than helium, So you know,
Speaker 4: the only people who could afford to explore at scale
Speaker 4: in North America where the oil and gas drillers. So
Speaker 4: we've found a niche where we're able to do that
Speaker 4: because it's a lot cheaper than in some other places.
Speaker 4: But that is really what separates us as a company
Speaker 4: in terms of we've been focused on grassroots exploration, saying
Speaker 4: the best stuff hasn't been found yet, and you know
Speaker 4: in those other industries, I think that's a problem going
Speaker 4: forward for a number of critical minerals and niche commodities
Speaker 4: where you can say, well, hypothetically there's rare earths in
Speaker 4: North Carolina, but how much do you want to spend
Speaker 4: looking for them, because it can cost hundreds of millions
Speaker 4: of dollars to go through holes in the ground.
Speaker 3: You know, you said earlier that there had been five
Speaker 3: previous helium shortages. I guess in recent times what happened
Speaker 3: during those Like how much substitution did you see of
Speaker 3: alternative gases? I guess I don't know what those would be,
Speaker 3: ne on maybe, And then how much rerooting did you
Speaker 3: see from like one geographic area to another, Like I
Speaker 3: guess what I'm asking is how flexible is the industry
Speaker 3: that relies on helium?
Speaker 4: So answering that in reverse, you know, the industrial gas
Speaker 4: companies that really distribute the helium and move it around
Speaker 4: the world and break it into smaller quantities to serve
Speaker 4: the end user. They do a phenomenal job with this,
Speaker 4: but it's a very very difficult problem. So when there's
Speaker 4: a shortage, there's absolutely a problem, particularly because of the
Speaker 4: specialized logistics, and there's not you know, a bunch of
Speaker 4: their extra helium containers lying around and things like that.
Speaker 4: In terms of what was your question about the previous
Speaker 4: helium shortages.
Speaker 3: Yeah, basically how much substitution did you see? Like are
Speaker 3: there other gases like neon that you can use instead
Speaker 3: of helium? And that basically just how easy is it
Speaker 3: for people to adapt to an actual helium shortage?
Speaker 4: So the first shortage was in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 4: and back then we had a lot more options in
Speaker 4: terms of in Europe, they've never really had a lot
Speaker 4: of helium the way we have in the US. So
Speaker 4: for that reason, they don't really have party balloons over there,
Speaker 4: which is the most visible thing for the average personet
Speaker 4: But they also have always used a lot more argone
Speaker 4: in welding. Helium is used in inert gas welding because
Speaker 4: it is a dirt, because it has high heat transfer,
Speaker 4: they've always used more urgun. We've always used more helium
Speaker 4: in the US, and there was a lot of substitution
Speaker 4: of saying, okay, we still need helium if you're welding
Speaker 4: stainless steel, titanium aluminum if you're doing thicker welds, but
Speaker 4: in some of the lower spec welding applications we were
Speaker 4: able to substitute argon. And you've also seen recycling where
Speaker 4: you know, if you're doing semiconductor lithography, you can't really
Speaker 4: recycle because you're putting other things in the gas, but
Speaker 4: if you're purely doing it for a cooling loop, you
Speaker 4: can start to recycle. And my understanding is that the
Speaker 4: MRI manufacturer is prior to two thousand and seven, they
Speaker 4: would build an MRI fill it up with liquid helium,
Speaker 4: make sure it works at the factory and then just
Speaker 4: vent it into the atmosphere and shift the unit and
Speaker 4: it would be refilled when it got there. So there's
Speaker 4: certainly been demand destruction from that. The other side of
Speaker 4: that coin is that there's very little opportunity for additional
Speaker 4: recycling or additional substitution at this point. And you know,
Speaker 4: I sort of tell people, if you're still using helium
Speaker 4: after four global shortages, you have to use helium.
Speaker 2: There are ballue There are helium balloons in Europe. In
Speaker 2: fact checked that they do exist. They perhaps I actually
Speaker 2: found a this is a very European. This is the
Speaker 2: most European looking document I've ever seen, which is this
Speaker 2: really serious like think Tank report on the Intentional Release
Speaker 2: of Balloons and Confetti and the Baltic Sea Area Scoping Study,
Speaker 2: a collection of existing information, regulation and best practices published
Speaker 2: by the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission, is a fifty
Speaker 2: page paper on the release of balloons. Anyway, sorry, but
Speaker 2: I take your point that for I but I also
Speaker 2: found a Reddit post someone asking where they can get
Speaker 2: helium balloons, So maybe they're not. Maybe they're not.
Speaker 4: If the EU has regulations on it. I'm willing to
Speaker 4: believe they've got it now.
Speaker 2: There's there's something going on there. You know. The thing,
Speaker 2: the big takeaway I have from this conversation, it's just
Speaker 2: going back to thinking about that thirty year release schedule
Speaker 2: from the helium reserve, and especially if you're not doing
Speaker 2: it at something resembling a market price, that must have
Speaker 2: just obliterated any like private sector activity. Because if there's
Speaker 2: going to be this fixed apply coming out too the
Speaker 2: market and it's not even price sensitive in any way,
Speaker 2: why would you ever like build out private production at
Speaker 2: that point.
Speaker 4: One hundred percent? That's been a big issue. And you
Speaker 4: know when I first started looking at this issue in
Speaker 4: twenty eleven, because my dad was involved in trying to
Speaker 4: advocate for fusion fission hybrid reactors and he shared a
Speaker 4: Brookings MIT conference on this and he was very disappointed.
Speaker 4: He said, the smartest guy there told him he was
Speaker 4: wasting his time because we were going to run out
Speaker 4: of helium before they could get the technology working. And
Speaker 4: you know, I fool He called me and I said,
Speaker 4: I thought that was for party balloons down. Cursed to
Speaker 4: be on the other side of that conversation for the
Speaker 4: rest of my life. But the America in physical society
Speaker 4: at the time, you know, put out a statement saying,
Speaker 4: not only should you do not sell this, helium is
Speaker 4: the one thing we should be building a bigger stockpile
Speaker 4: of for the future. And you know, I sort of
Speaker 4: compared the situation to what happened in with uranium in
Speaker 4: the Megatons to megawatts program after the fall of the
Speaker 4: Soviet Union. We took a bunch of their former Soviet
Speaker 4: nuclear weapons, we turned them into power plant fuel just
Speaker 4: because of proliferation reasons, and sold that into the market.
Speaker 4: And similar thing. You know, you dump a bunch of
Speaker 4: supply into the market for a long time and then
Speaker 4: there's no incentive for exploration, and uranium prices went up,
Speaker 4: you know, five hundred percent nearly two thousands. So that's
Speaker 4: certainly been a factor in terms of you know, why
Speaker 4: haven't people been doing this the whole time?
Speaker 3: Well, okay, on that note, you're the founder and CEO
Speaker 3: of North American Helium, and we know that helium prices
Speaker 3: are going up, even though we don't have a very
Speaker 3: good benchmark, but you know, broadly, we know that it's
Speaker 3: going to get more expensive. What do you do with
Speaker 3: that price signal, Do you invest more? Do you expand?
Speaker 3: Given the limitations around you know, exploring for LERG and
Speaker 3: things like that, what do you do.
Speaker 4: We're on the unique end of the spectrum in the
Speaker 4: industry because we're not running a ten billion dollar energy
Speaker 4: project or something like that, because we're producing. We're only
Speaker 4: drilling for helium from non hydrocarbon sources, so we're essentially
Speaker 4: looking for We're drilling into older rocks that pre date
Speaker 4: plant life on Earth, so there's not a lot of
Speaker 4: organic material there. So you're drilling for fields of helium
Speaker 4: and nitrogen and these exist, and you know where we
Speaker 4: are primarily operating in southwest Saskatchewan and Canada. They had
Speaker 4: found a field like this in the nineteen sixties. They
Speaker 4: wrote helium legislation, which made them very unique. But because
Speaker 4: of the combination of the forced sales from the federal
Speaker 4: stockpile keeping helium prices low and nitrogen being worthless because
Speaker 4: it's already eighty percent of the atmosphere, no one ever
Speaker 4: came back and looked at this. But we're certainly, I
Speaker 4: would say, we were already going pretty fast, certainly in
Speaker 4: an environment like this. You know, our mission is to
Speaker 4: support science and industry. So all of a sudden, this
Speaker 4: is a big problem. We're going to do everything we
Speaker 4: can to increase our rate of exploration, bringing new plants
Speaker 4: onto production, and you know, really trying to support some
Speaker 4: of the most vital uses of helium then we've had
Speaker 4: in previous shortages. One of the problems is it's not
Speaker 4: a question of for the end user. It's not a
Speaker 4: question of whether or not you get the helium or not.
Speaker 4: The consequences of not getting helium across the value chain
Speaker 4: are pretty significant. If you're Party City, you go bankrupt.
Speaker 4: If you're a chip manufacturer, you have to shut down
Speaker 4: chip manufacturing, and that's you know, the dollar amount there
Speaker 4: is just tremendous. If you're running MRI or their cousin
Speaker 4: an MR, which is used for drug discovery and things
Speaker 4: like that, if that mag and it heats up, it
Speaker 4: will destroy the magnet, so you're talking about your machine
Speaker 4: getting destroyed, essentially. So we're very focused on supporting those
Speaker 4: vital end uses and if people can't do as much
Speaker 4: welding for a little while, you know, it is what
Speaker 4: it is. But in general, the price is very volatile
Speaker 4: because helium is a very small percentage of the cost
Speaker 4: of goods sold for all of us.
Speaker 3: Sorry, just to press on this point. I'm going to
Speaker 3: assume that you're going to make more money in the
Speaker 3: coming months as a result of helium supply getting squeezed
Speaker 3: in cattarc.
Speaker 2: What are the.
Speaker 3: Major choke points at your company that you would be
Speaker 3: trying to use that money to resolve. Is it actually
Speaker 3: finding new fields or is it investing in more storage capacity,
Speaker 3: transportation investment? Like, what are you going to do with
Speaker 3: the money?
Speaker 4: It's a little bit of all of the above. Our
Speaker 4: focus has always been on the lack of reliability in
Speaker 4: the supply chain, which comes from two things. One is
Speaker 4: the extreme concentration where you've got one Exxon Co two
Speaker 4: project in Wyoming it's a quarter of world supply. You've
Speaker 4: got one LNG facility that's a third of world supply.
Speaker 4: You've now got production in Russia, which has its own issues.
Speaker 4: So the geopolitics and the concentration are a problem. So
Speaker 4: we've been working for the last thirteen years to build
Speaker 4: a new helium hub to create you know, helium supply
Speaker 4: from non hydridcarbon sources in Western Canada, and for that reason,
Speaker 4: we run a bunch of stuff in parallel, so we'll
Speaker 4: be bringing a new facility online that will increase our
Speaker 4: production by forty percent later this year. We're also drilling
Speaker 4: for you know, doing exploration for the next field. We're
Speaker 4: also looking at doing much more grassroots exploration for just
Speaker 4: continuing to understand the area because we have nine million
Speaker 4: acres of long term helium rights, so it takes three
Speaker 4: hours to drive across it. This is We've identified a
Speaker 4: thousand structures from seismic data that we have not drilled yet,
Speaker 4: so it's really all of those things. One of the
Speaker 4: biggest things that we've been looking at is building a
Speaker 4: helium liquifier in Canada because right now we have nine
Speaker 4: facilities that are producing helium and we truck all of
Speaker 4: that in carbon fiber overwrapp tube trailers down to existing
Speaker 4: liquifiers in the US Mid Continent, and there's a lot
Speaker 4: of extra capacity down there because production has been falling
Speaker 4: in the US for the last thirty five years. But
Speaker 4: building a helium liquifire in Canada along the Trans Canada Highway,
Speaker 4: which runs through the middle of our properties, really lowers
Speaker 4: the cost. It also lowers the emissions, which is something
Speaker 4: people cared a lot more about four years ago, but
Speaker 4: we still think is important and opens up this area
Speaker 4: as more of a global hub. And also, if you
Speaker 4: think about the high end customers, they're very concerned with purity.
Speaker 4: The average customer is taking liquid helium at grade P,
Speaker 4: which is sort of the industry standard. You can think
Speaker 4: of it as more or less five nines purity ninety
Speaker 4: nine point nine nine nine percent pure. The leading edge
Speaker 4: chip manufacturers are now looking for six nines purity and
Speaker 4: right now that primarily either comes from Exxon's facility or
Speaker 4: it comes from Cover. So all of a sudden, you've
Speaker 4: got a big issue there. And if you want to
Speaker 4: think about you know, I know, you guys love all
Speaker 4: of the weird logistical stuff. There's only so many liquid
Speaker 4: helium containers in the world. Yeah, and if you want
Speaker 4: six nines purity, you don't ever want to fill that
Speaker 4: with five nines because you might get a molecule of
Speaker 4: hydrogen in there. So those containers are sort of kept separate,
Speaker 4: and the fiber optic manufacturers have their own containers. So
Speaker 4: now you've got an issue where the special containers for
Speaker 4: the semiconductor firms or trapped somewhere they've got to go
Speaker 4: somewhere else. You've got to say, well, we need more
Speaker 4: of this from the Exon facility, and maybe that's going
Speaker 4: to cause a problem somewhere else. But building our own
Speaker 4: liqui fire gives us the opportunity to meet any purity
Speaker 4: and be able to sort of you kind of go
Speaker 4: farm to table with the whole supply chain.
Speaker 2: Fable. Nicholas Snyder, thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: Odd Lots. I learned a lot about helium in that conversation.
Speaker 4: That was fantastic, Tracy, Thanks so much your.
Speaker 2: Pleasure, Tracy. I really want to do a live episode
Speaker 2: one day in Saskatchewan with Nicholas and Maraud al Katib,
Speaker 2: the Lentil King of Saskachewan. We got to have the
Speaker 2: helium King of Saskatchewan and the lentil King of Saskatchewan.
Speaker 2: I think that'd be a great live event for us.
Speaker 3: I want to go scout scout the planes for helium.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I guess now, that was a fascinating episode. I mean,
Speaker 3: all of these niche commodities are fascinating. I will say
Speaker 3: one thing that keeps getting repeated on all of these shows,
Speaker 3: and you touched on it, already is this idea that
Speaker 3: we haven't actually seen the physical impact just yet, and
Speaker 3: it's coming down the line. And you can imagine there
Speaker 3: are a lot of consumers of specific products out there
Speaker 3: who for now are able to say, you know, we're
Speaker 3: doing all right, but in maybe a month, maybe three months,
Speaker 3: maybe four months, if things keep going as they are,
Speaker 3: and even frankly, if the war were to stop tomorrow,
Speaker 3: you would probably have some sort of impact.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what, it reminds me of May twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. It's like the shortages are coming to the
Speaker 2: shelves because of the tariffs. Yeah, and they didn't and
Speaker 2: that it's like, well, but that.
Speaker 3: Was partially because Trump, Yeah started.
Speaker 2: I know, he did, he did, he did. But I
Speaker 2: do think we're at like this weird moment where it's
Speaker 2: like nothing ever happens, but maybe it will. But yeah,
Speaker 2: but everyone who we talk to in commodities essentially is
Speaker 2: like we're in the phase where the water has come out.
Speaker 2: In the longer it takes for production to restart and
Speaker 2: the straight to reopen, the greater the damage is going
Speaker 2: to be.
Speaker 4: You know what.
Speaker 2: I think it's like really interesting about this conversation particular,
Speaker 2: and they're actually from a sort of economic standpoints, like
Speaker 2: several very interesting threads in there. So first of all,
Speaker 2: there's the part about how like if you're selling helium
Speaker 2: at the same clip every year of a thirty years,
Speaker 2: you destroy any sort of semblance of a market. And yeah,
Speaker 2: for private production, that's interesting. Another interesting thing is that, okay,
Speaker 2: like helium itself is sort of scarce and not all
Speaker 2: over the place. And then the scarcity of the containers
Speaker 2: to uh, he kept coming back to the containers. There
Speaker 2: aren't that many containers in the world because if helium
Speaker 2: can go through glass, that means it's so small and
Speaker 2: not a lot contrapant. Even the containers that exist can
Speaker 2: only hold it for so long. And then the fact
Speaker 2: that the helium that's needed for the most advanced science,
Speaker 2: as you mentioned at the end, they want the six
Speaker 2: nines purity, not the five nines purity, and so they
Speaker 2: have their own separate set of containers that like it's
Speaker 2: almost impossible to imagine like at this point like a
Speaker 2: sort of like truly coordinated like commodity helium just because
Speaker 2: kind of like natural gas, so much of the store
Speaker 2: seems to be in the shipping and holding of it
Speaker 2: rather than the commodity per se.
Speaker 3: No, it strikes me as very similar and like helium
Speaker 3: is even more gnat gas than that gas, right in
Speaker 3: the sense that we don't even have any pricing to
Speaker 3: look basically, which is just shocking to me as someone
Speaker 3: who's been staring at a Bloomberg terminal for many, many years.
Speaker 3: It feels really weird when you can't get a price
Speaker 3: of something.
Speaker 2: So there is so like typically speaking, if you enter
Speaker 2: in any ticker in the terminal, something will come up
Speaker 2: and there is actually a something. There's a helium No,
Speaker 2: there's a helium index, but whatever it was, it was
Speaker 2: put together by the Bureau of Land Management and they
Speaker 2: ended it in twenty eighteen, like they stopped whatever whatever
Speaker 2: this indexes in twenty eighteen. So there is not a
Speaker 2: lot of there's not a lot of data on helium,
Speaker 2: and I've found that to be the case with a
Speaker 2: lot of the nisia. Yeah, discontinued. It's for historical purposes
Speaker 2: only to the dees page.
Speaker 3: Well, the other weird thing about it is it doesn't
Speaker 3: actually look that volatile at all.
Speaker 2: It seems like hi, so I don't even believe that.
Speaker 3: You yeah, exactly, Okay, well, if anyone wants to create
Speaker 3: some sort of pricing index for Helium, let us know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'd love to check it out.
Speaker 3: Shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe wi Isn't all. You could follow me
Speaker 2: at the Stalwart. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen
Speaker 2: armand Dash'll Bennett at dashbot In, Kale Brooks and Kale Brooks.
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