JSE-listed African Oxygen (Afrox) planned to ensure continued helium gas supply through ongoing investments in it global footprint, the addition of transfilling systems to supply more customers locally, as well as a focus on loss reduction and helium conservation, products manager Marietha Strydom has indicated.

Contributing to Afrox’s persistently unwithered supply, she said, was parent company, the Linde Group’s, decision to switch Afrox’s helium supply from the US to the European/Middle Eastern supply chain, “The shorter shipping route means far lower losses and, therefore, higher product availability.”

Styrdom noted that Afrox had not run out of helium baseline 5.0 over the past year, while the company’s availability of liquid helium had been equally good.

“By reducing our losses, we are also able to offer helium at a very competitive price,” she noted.

Despite the global helium shortage, worldwide demand for helium has been steadily increasing to meet the requirements of conventional applications and the latest new-frontier uses.

Helium is used in gaseous form in, besides others, welding and cutting, fibre optics, electronics, aerospace applications, leak-testing, deep-sea diving, welding, and in liquid form for cooling superconductive magnets.

Strydom pointed out that, although the industrial gases industry faced one of the most prolonged shortages in the history of global helium supply in 2012, Afrox expected the situation to improve in the medium term.

“There are only 14 commercial sources of supply around the world. Helium from these sources is a component of natural gas and must be extracted by natural gas companies to provide crude helium for commercial helium suppliers such as Linde.  Every year, there are planned and unplanned events that disrupt the supply from one source or another and this affects the balance of the entire global supply and demand scenario,” she stated.

Adding to supply pressures was the fact that many helium gas sources that were supposed to come on stream did not materialise, owing to technical, financial or legislative reasons.

“These sources are still expected to come on stream, but with a few years’ delay. At the same time, some existing sources are not performing to expectation,” Strydom added.

The Linde Group buys much of its helium in Qatar, in the Middle East, from the Qatar 1 helium project. When the world’s largest source, the Qatar 2 helium plant, comes on stream in 2013, Linde would buy 30% of its output.

The plant is expected to deliver 1.3-billion cubic feet a year of helium once complete.