Helium Shortage 5.0: the fifth major supply crisis in two decades.
The war in Iran, and delays in the Strait of Hormuz, have impacted a wide variety of supply chains, but one of the less publicised consequences has been a significant reduction in the global availability of helium. Helium performs a vital role in many industrial and medical applications, but it is also utilised by the laboratories that conduct routine spot-checks on power transformers. Lack of helium or raised prices could therefore impact transformer reliability, but in the following article JP Pouttu*, Director Power Business at Vaisala, explains why a lack of helium is not the real problem; it’s the reliance on spot-checking rather than continuous monitoring, that raises transformer risk.
Background
On March 2, 2026, Iranian drones struck Qatar's Ras Laffan industrial complex. QatarEnergy declared force majeure and halted LNG production, and with it, helium extraction. Qatar supplies roughly a third of the world's helium. The strike damaged around 17 percent of Qatar's total LNG capacity, and repairs could take up to five years.
The Strait of Hormuz closure compounded the disruption in an unexpected way: cryogenic containers already filled with helium and ready to ship were stranded.
The price response was immediate. Spot prices rose from around $500 (€440) per thousand cubic feet to $1,000–1,200 (€800-1000) within weeks, roughly doubling. Contract prices have risen up to 40 percent. In a prolonged disruption scenario, analysts project prices could exceed $2,000. Supply is expected to remain approximately 15 percent short* of demand through 2027, with some analysts predicting up to 30 percent if disruptions persist.
This is already being called Helium Shortage 5.0: the fifth major supply crisis in two decades, and the first to combine a production stoppage, a logistics blockade, and an active armed conflict with no clear end-date.
Coverage has focused on the expected casualties. South Korea sourced nearly 65 percent of its helium from Qatar in 2025 and produces around two-thirds of the world's memory chips: Samsung, SK Hynix, and TSMC are all exposed. MRI machines require around 1,500 litres of liquid helium to operate, with no alternative cooling method available. Hard drive manufacturers Micron, Seagate, and Western Digital have reported 20–30 percent price increases on their 2026 production allocations.
One downstream effect has gone largely unreported: dissolved gas analysis (DGA) for power transformers.
What is at stake.
DGA monitoring rests on a straightforward observation: the majority of power transformer faults do not happen without warning. They announce themselves in advance — as gases that dissolve into insulating oil over weeks or months before an acute failure occurs. Gas chromatography-based DGA, both in laboratory and field-deployed form, uses helium as the carrier gas.
Laboratory DGA services now require regular supplies of lab-grade helium, which has become harder to source and significantly more expensive over the past eighteen months.
Why monitoring isn't optional: the lesson from Heathrow.
On the night of March 20, 2025, a transformer fire at the North Hyde substation in West London
shut down Heathrow Airport for nearly 18 hours. More than 1,300 flights were cancelled. Around 290,000 passengers were disrupted. Some 67,000 homes and businesses lost power. The airport, which handles £190 billion (€222b) of British air cargo annually, was effectively offline for a day because a single transformer failed.
The incident was, in the words of the Westminster Energy Secretary, "catastrophic" and "unprecedented." The NESO investigation found that the 57-year-old substation lacked adequate fire separation between transformers, meaning when one failed, it took the backup with it. Resilience had been assumed. It had not been verified.
The Heathrow case illustrates why condition monitoring is not a budget line to optimise. It is the early warning system that sits between an ageing asset and an uncontrolled failure. A transformer that sends advance signals — through dissolved gas patterns that DGA captures — is one that gives operators time to act. A transformer that fails silently, or whose monitoring has lapsed, does not.
This is not a hypothetical risk. Power transformer lead times never fully recovered from the post-pandemic supply chain disruption, and they are now under fresh pressure from surging demand driven by data centers, EV infrastructure, and grid expansion. The IEA warned in early 2025 that it now takes up to four years to secure large power transformers. There is no rapid replacement market.
The stakes are worth stating plainly. Electricity is not a commodity. It is the substrate that everything else runs on. Essential services rely on a stable and reliable supply of electricity - hospitals, intensive care units, traffic management, rail networks, heating systems, water treatment, food/beverage cold chains, communication networks, datacentres etc. None of this functions without a stable grid. And the grid depends on transformers that, in many cases, were built in the 1960s and 1970s and have no immediate replacement waiting in a warehouse.
When a critical transformer goes down unexpectedly, the consequences cascade, exactly as they did at Heathrow.
The hidden cost is not in the helium bottle.
Rising helium costs show up on invoices, but that is not the most significant risk. The more significant risk lies with lengthening periods between monitoring.
The value of online DGA monitoring is not what it measures when everything is fine. It is that it catches changes early, when maintenance can be planned and controlled. An unplanned transformer failure is an entirely different event: lost production, emergency procurement, potential collateral equipment damage, insurance excess, and regulatory attention.
If helium supply constraints force monitoring gaps, the line-item price increase is no longer the most interesting number on the page. The risk-weighted cost of operating without visibility is.
What are the options going forward?
1. Wait it out. Absorb the increased cost and hope the market eases. This can be defensible where online DGA is one layer within a broader laboratory-based condition monitoring program.
2. Switch carrier gas in the lab. Hydrogen is the most discussed laboratory alternative for gas chromatography. For field-deployed online monitors, the transition introduces its own complications: safety requirements, on-site generation or storage, and a new consumable supply chain to manage. A workable option for some labs; an awkward one for most field installations.
3. Reconsider the underlying measurement technology. Infrared light based NDIR measurement technology requires no carrier gas at all. It is a physically different approach that has been in commercial field use for over a decade. Vaisala's field-deployed NDIR monitoring solution has been operating for over a decade across 70 countries, from arctic substations to tropical grid infrastructure. It is no longer an emerging alternative. It is a proven one.
The right answer depends on fleet size, asset criticality, and how deeply the current monitoring architecture is built around helium-dependent measurement services.
Questions worth addressing now.
Helium price increases have not yet landed on every operational budget. Three questions are worth addressing before they do:
- How exposed is your current DGA approach to carrier gas supply chain disruption?
- What is the real cost of a missed alarm on your most critical assets?
- When the next technology refresh comes, how does helium dependence factor into the evaluation criteria?
Heathrow was a case study in what happens when resilience is assumed rather than maintained. The helium crisis is a slow-moving version of the same problem: a supply chain dependency, largely invisible until it isn't, sitting inside the monitoring architecture that critical infrastructure depends on.
The helium crisis will ease eventually. The more durable question is whether helium-dependent monitoring still earns its place.
Summary
The Iran War has highlighted a risk in the helium supply chain, which therefore represents a risk to transformer spot-checking procedures. However, more importantly, the bigger picture is that this situation has served to highlight the level of entrained risk that exist in procedures that, by definition, allow risk to accumulate between spot-checks.
Spot-sampling creates gaps in transformer condition visibility. Continuous online monitoring eliminates that gap entirely, with no carrier gas, no delivery schedules and no lab backlogs. The helium shortage makes that gap visible. It was always there.
* About the author: JP Pouttu is Director of Vaisala's Power Business Line, which develops helium-free, infrared-based online DGA continuous monitors for power transformer operators.
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