A Qatari restart will not refill your helium cylinders
Bloomberg ship-tracking data reported in August put the 10-day moving average for Ras Laffan LNG loadings at about 80,000 tonnes, the highest level since March, but still roughly 60% below the same period last year. The number looks better than it is. As of mid-August, some buyers still had no clarity on September cargoes, and the tanker strikes that stopped July’s ramp-up had kept shipping risk alive.
Anyone buying helium for leak testing should read those headlines slowly. Liquefied natural gas and helium do not recover on the same schedule. Gas output can climb within weeks of a restart decision, while helium reaching a cylinder on a European shop floor takes considerably longer. At the same time, other industries decide the order of the queue. So it is worth separating what has actually restarted from what will reach your shop floor, and then settling on a planning assumption for the rest of the decade.
What has actually restarted at Ras Laffan
Reuters reported that QatarEnergy halted LNG and associated-product output in March as attacks disrupted Ras Laffan and Mesaieed. The more durable capacity loss came after the strikes of 18 and 19 March, when two LNG trains were damaged, removing 12.8 million tonnes per year (mtpa) of capacity for an estimated three to five years.
Recovery began in April. Reuters reported on 8 April that two of the three trains at QELNG North 1, Qatar's original LNG project with roughly 10 mtpa of capacity, had been reactivated. By mid-June, according to a Reuters source familiar with the matter, QatarEnergy was ready to restart quickly and expected full output from the facilities unaffected by the strikes within a month.
July undid that timetable. A Qatari LNG tanker was struck near the Strait of Hormuz on 7 July, and the ramp-up stopped again. No QatarEnergy-controlled LNG carrier left the strait between 11 and 30 July, when one finally exited. Call the current state what it is: a partial recovery, interrupted more than once, with force majeure still affecting cargoes and export volumes well below pre-war levels.
Why helium arrives long after the gas does
Helium leaves the liquefaction process as a by-product, and extraction depends on specific trains running at Ras Laffan. Partial LNG recovery therefore gives you partial helium recovery at best, and only from the units that produce it.
The real delay comes afterwards. Crude helium has to be purified and liquefied before anyone can ship it. Distribution then relies on specialised cryogenic transportation tanks, since helium becomes liquid at around minus 269 degrees Celsius. Those vessels are expensive, scarce and slow to reposition. The crisis scattered them across the supply chain, some stranded in the Gulf, others idling at destination terminals or waiting for backhaul, so container circulation can stay constrained well after LNG production begins to recover.
Once purified helium reaches a filling plant, allocation takes over.
The allocation queue puts quality assurance near the back
Gas suppliers rank customers by how critical the application is, and semiconductor manufacturing sits at the front. A market update from WestAir - a US industrial gas distributor - described distributors rationing supply, prioritising healthcare customers and adding surcharges, with Airgas anticipating allocations of up to 50% of normal monthly volumes for some clients.
Leak testing buyers should not assume they will rank alongside semiconductor fabs, MRI supply chains or other critical applications when allocation tightens. Most purchasing departments still file helium under consumables, and that filing is where the damage starts. A leak tester without gas halts a production stage and blocks the end-of-line release of finished assemblies, so completed units stay in the plant. Automotive, aerospace, HVAC and energy manufacturers all share that exposure.
The capacity a ceasefire cannot return
Part of the lost supply will not come back quickly, whatever happens politically. Reuters reported that two LNG trains with a combined capacity of 12.8 mtpa, about 17% of Qatar's LNG export capacity, are expected to remain offline for three to five years. Wood Mackenzie's assessment of the damaged South site, according to The National, puts its capacity at 24 mtpa, down from 36 mtpa before the strikes.
The bottleneck is mechanical. Replacement gas turbines are needed to drive the refrigeration compressors, and only three manufacturers worldwide build them, with delivery lead times of two to four years. No insurance settlement or shipping recovery shortens that queue.
USGS estimates put Qatar's helium production at about one-third of global output: roughly 64 million cubic metres out of an estimated 183 million in 2024, and 63 million out of about 190 million in 2025. A material reduction in Qatari liquefaction capacity therefore takes a slice of world helium supply with it, and holds it out of the market long enough to shape planning through the end of the decade.
Replacement supply is harder to reach
European buyers who counted on other regions to fill the gap have watched two routes narrow this year.
Russia has imposed temporary export controls for helium outside the Eurasian Economic Union until the end of 2027, making those volumes harder to rely on as flexible replacement supply. China then issued a temporary helium export ban effective 10 July, framed as a move to protect domestic supply as Middle East disruption threatened chip-manufacturing inputs. Policy decisions of this kind follow political timetables, so neither responds to a repair schedule in Qatar.
Priority demand keeps rising
Semiconductor manufacturing has become a structurally larger helium buyer. Gasworld reported that semiconductors accounted for about 21% of global helium demand in 2025, a share that shifts with how the market is defined. SEMI's World Fab Forecast counted 18 new fab construction projects starting in 2025, most of them expected to begin operations in 2026 or 2027. IDTechEx expects semiconductor helium demand to rise more than fivefold by 2035.
Advanced fabs absorb helium price increases more easily than most industrial users, and suppliers have strong commercial reasons to protect those accounts first. That logic drives the allocation queue, and rising fab demand pushes every other user further down it.
The planning assumption to hold until 2029
Forecasts of the shortage itself vary, and most of them come from companies that sell gas. The WestAir update cited above expects the shortage to last up to five years with prices elevated for up to three, and it is worth reading that as a distributor's view of its own market rather than as an independent projection.
The dated facts point the same way, and they carry no sales interest. Reuters puts 12.8 mtpa offline for three to five years. Turbine lead times run to four. Russian export controls hold until the end of 2027, the Chinese ban has no published end date, the cryogenic container fleet is still repositioning, and fab demand keeps climbing. MVS Technologies draws one conclusion from those dates: Do not plan for an abundant helium market before 2029.
Three things follow from that assumption for anyone specifying or operating helium leak testing.
Put today's gas price into every payback calculation, not the price you paid in 2024. Equipment business cases written against pre-crisis helium costs understate the return on any measure that cuts consumption, often by a wide margin.
Read the allocation and force majeure language in your supply contract before you need it. Find out where your plant ranks with your supplier, and what notice period you would actually get. Several manufacturers learned their position in the queue during the same week they needed it.
Meter your helium consumption per test cycle. Most plants cannot state that figure with any confidence, which turns budgeting and risk assessment into guesswork, and metering the loop costs very little compared with what it tells you.
Closing the loop
Manufacturers who vent helium after every test have little operational buffer when allocation tightens. Capture and reuse it, and fresh gas becomes a top-up rather than the whole supply base.
MVS Technologies' Helium Recovery Units reclaim up to 95% of the helium used in testing. They handle pressures from 1 to 1,200 bar and helium concentrations between 10% and 95%, and come as either integrated units built into the leak tester or standalone machines serving several existing benches. Rental HRUs cover urgent cases, where a plant needs recovery capacity in place before a full custom design can be delivered. This introduction to Helium Recovery Units explains how the technology works, and our earlier article on why helium recovery became a strategic priority covers how the 2026 crisis unfolded.
The restart will appear in gas market reports long before it changes your invoice. Plan accordingly.
Talk to our engineers about metering your current helium consumption and sizing a recovery solution for your test benches.
