The war in Iran is about to hit the helium supply, which is critical for more than just party balloons

[BumRushDaShow]

14. Don't "doubt", look at the conditions

AND what is taking much of it.

BBC had a good summary last year about what happened during the 2022 shortage and that will inform on what is starting to happen again -

The world keeps running out of helium. There is now a race to prepare for the next shortage

(snip)

The most recent severe shortage in 2022 that scuppered some of Washton's research occurred after a series of fires at a major Russian gas processing plant in the Amur region of Siberia. The war in Ukraine compounded the problem by further choking supplies at the same time a helium plant in Qatar went offline for planned maintenance. Meanwhile, the crude helium enrichment unit at the US National Helium Reserve was shut down during the summer of 2021 and again for four months at the end of January 2022. The US shutdown removed around 10% of the global production capacity of helium from the supply chain. Taken together, these incidents led to a sudden shortage and highlighted just how vulnerable the world's helium supply could be. By 2023, the industrial sale price of helium had nearly doubled from what it was five years before, reaching an all-time high.

(snip)

I also remember during my chem lab days, there were shortages of lab grade Acetone, a solvent we used quite a bit, and whatever we could find, ended up exorbitant during those shortage periods.

ETA - because of the ramp up of EV batteries, let alone billions and billions of AI chips, the need and demand for Helium, has exploded exponentially.