While you may know it as the substance that allows balloons to defy gravity, the uses of helium extend far beyond mere amusement. In scientific research, helium is indispensable—used in everything from cooling the powerful magnets in MRI machines to enabling the Large Hadron Collider to delve into the mysteries of particle physics. You rely on its unique properties often without even realising it, as it quietly underpins a multitude of technologies woven into the fabric of daily life. Yet, as we stand on the brink of new scientific revelations, it’s crucial to understand why the scarcity of this unsung hero could pose a threat to innovation and what steps the global community must take to ensure its availability for future generations.

While the global economy relies on many commodities, none come close to the massive scale of the oil market. Besides being the primary energy source for transportation, oil is a key raw material for numerous other industries like plastics, fertilizers, cosmetics, and medicine. As a result, the global physical oil market is astronomical in size and has a significant economic and geopolitical influence, with a few countries dominating global oil production. The above infographic puts crude oil’s market size into perspective by comparing it to the 10 largest metal markets combined. To calculate market sizes, we used the latest price multiplied by global production in 2022, based on data from TradingEconomics and the United States Geological Survey (USGS).