The gas that keeps hospital MRI scanners running has been caught in the crossfire of the war in Iran, raising the prospect of diagnostic delays, rising costs and rationing of one of modern medicine’s most important imaging tools.

Roughly a quarter of all helium consumed worldwide goes toward cooling the superconducting magnets inside MRI scanners. While helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, on Earth, it is found only in trace quantities within certain natural gas deposits. It cannot be synthesised and requires highly advanced equipment to transport, making its supply chain so shaky that the global current helium shortage is the fifth in the past two decades.

Iranian missile strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City in late February caused three fires and destroyed approximately 17% of the country’s LNG export capacity. QatarEnergy, the state-run energy firm, halted all production on March 2, stating production will resume only when security in the Strait of Hormuz is guaranteed, taking a third of global helium supply offline.

When secure passage through the Straight, which is currently locked down by Iran amid war with the United States and Israel, will become a reality is, at present, anyone’s guess. Reuters reported on Monday that the text of a possible ceasefire agreement brokered by Pakistan had been sent to the US and Iranian delegations for review.

Two days earlier, US President Donald Trump referred to his Iranian intermediaries as “crazy bastards” who would “be living in hell” if they did not back down from restricting access to the narrow maritime waterway through which 20% of the world’s LNG and oil, and about 25% of total trade passes.

“Open the Fuckin’ Straight!” Trump declared on his social media platform, Truth Social.

While the US views the opening of the Straight of Hormuz as the single key concession necessary from Iran in any deal to conclude the conflict, the efficacy of Iran’s closure has demonstrated the power its geography allows it to exert over the global economy. The shutdown has sent energy markets spiralling, spread rolling blackouts across the globe, and caused fears of a new global hunger crisis.

Iran’s government is now seeking to use that control to establish permanent tolls, and is unlikely to relinquish its newfound chokehold on the world economy. Senior Iranian officials told Reuters on Monday that a temporary ceasefire would be insufficient to reopen the Straight. US diplomats, meanwhile, called the proposal “one of many ideas,” adding: “Trump has not signed off on it. Operation Epic Fury continues.”

Rich competitors crowd the helium market as price doubles

Liquid helium must be transported in specialised cryogenic ISO containers maintained near absolute zero. There are roughly 6,000 such containers in the world.

Virtually all of Qatar’s helium exports leave by sea through the Strait of Hormuz, with no alternative maritime route. When the strait closed to most commercial traffic in early March, roughly 200 cryogenic containers were stranded in or near Qatar. The containers sitting idle near the Gulf cannot be filled elsewhere, as every stranded unit represents lost helium and lost transport capacity for the entire global network.

Even the best-insulated units can only hold liquid helium for about 45 days before it warms, boils off, and escapes. This means helium supply chains cannot absorb delays the way oil or grain markets can. The containers must stay on the move, or the fragile deadlines and important positioning of each container in the systems is thrown off entirely.

With billions of dollars in lost gas revenue and a war still underway, restoring a relatively niche byproduct such as helium is not the top priority. The helium market is worth about $6 billion annually, compared to over $170 billion in global LNG trading.

Following the attack on Ras Laffan, QatarEnergy announced a permanent 14% cut in liquid helium exports. Two other key production hubs in Algeria, which hold the world’s third-largest helium reserves, have moved away from capturing helium due to skyrocketing gas prices in Europe, to which it has a direct pipeline.

LNG sold directly through pipeline channels does not go through the process of separating helium, causing rising gas prices to have a snowball effect on helium available on global markets as producers try to sell directly. With European gas prices up 60% since the conflict began, Algerian pipeline gas flows to Europe rose 22% in early 2026.

For hospitals, the crisis is compounded by who they are competing against for this shrinking supply, as bidding wars have more than doubled helium prices on the open market.

Helium is essential for the chip industry, which, propelled by the AI boom, is one of the most powerful forces in the global economy, underpinning the titans from Nvidia to Google, OpenAI, Meta and Oracle, buoying over a third of the United States GDP. It is also critical to drones, rockets, and all kinds of semiconductors underpinning everything with a microchip in it: cars, weapons, fridges, laptops, phones, and more.

Hospitals, already operating on regulated pricing and thin margins, cannot outbid that kind of purchasing power. In this shortage, medical uses risk being an afterthought.

The medical world has known this for some time. After five helium shortages in 20 years, researchers and MRI manufacturers have been racing to build scanners that do not depend on the gas at all. However, the vast majority of the world’s MRI fleet still runs on technology that needs helium.

Replacing its critical role in MRI scanners will be impossible in the short term.

“This is the big one that we always feared would happen, it’s the black swan event,” Cliff Cain of Pulsar, a helium exploration company, told the Wall Street Journal. “It is just going to be a building crescendo of who’s going to be able to get their molecules and who is not.”