Helium is a useful gas.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2018/08/news-helium-mri-superconducting-markets-reserve-technology/
The helium market's core currently lurks underneath Amarillo, Texas. Since the 1920s, the town has been home to the Federal Helium Reserve, a massive underground geological formation that acts as the U.S. strategic supply. Amarillo calls itself the Helium Capital of the World; there's a monument to the element in town, a six-story steel spire with a model of a helium atom at its center.
When we run out, we're out, it's not feasible to get more from anywhere but NG wells, in effect.
Helium is very useful... It's actually critical to most modern enterprise hard drives. Because helium is so much lighter than air, and as a pure gas, it allows HDD vendors to pack more platters into a specific disk. Many people don't realize it, but the heads inside a hard drive are legitimately flying above the media surface, using the airspeed created by the spinning platters over an air bearing surface to generate lift.
Normal air is turbulent, but pure helium is much less so. So by filling a drive with helium, higher platter counts and thus higher drive capacities can be achieved.
The problem is that helium is a wily little molecule, and likes to escape from basically anywhere it exists. It can seep through nearly anything. So the process of sealing a drive containing helium such that it will continue to contain helium is non-trivial. I can't really go into the technologies involved in sealing a drive so that the helium can't escape (trade secrets / confidentiality and such), but it's pretty sophisticated.
Older (air) hard drives aren't sealed. They have a filter to keep particulates out, but they equalize to the air pressure around them. This creates a problem... In order to fly, you need a certain density of air. As you go higher in elevation, and the air thins, you can reach a point where hard drives can no longer reliably operate because the air density is too low for their heads to fly at the same distance over the media that they need. Typical air HDDs have a spec of maximum operating elevation of 10,000 ft.
So... Why am I boring all of you with this? Because here's the fun part.
You recall earlier this year when the first ever image of a black hole was announced? It was a big thing...
Well, helium played a role in that. Many of these major observatories exist about 10,000 ft. Because of the huge amount of data they are storing [coupled with the shoestring budgets that they work under], hard drives are the only storage medium they can use. Well, apparently their drives were dying left and right because of the elevation... Until they started using helium drives. Because helium drives are sealed, they are immune to the elevation changes that would affect air drives.
This was a pretty exciting thing for my company, being involved in such a major scientific event. It's always fun to tell the kids, who basically have no understanding of what I do, that I can point to something like this and say that while I wasn't involved in any tangible way, it would have been VERY hard for them to accomplish this without our products...
https://blog.westerndigital.com/helium-filled-hdd-black-hole-image/
