Hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources - To Consider the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013

Hearing

Thank you all for joining us today for this hearing to receive testimony on S.783, the
Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. This is a bipartisan bill that Senators Murkowski and I
introduced to create an orderly phase out of the commercial use of the Federal Helium
Reserve while preventing the disruption of the helium supply chain upon which major
parts of the U.S. economy depend.

While many consumers only contact with helium comes when they are purchasing party
balloons, it is a critical resource for a number of key sectors of our economy. Helium is
used as a coolant for MRI machines. It's used in semiconductor manufacturing, fiber
optics manufacturing, and research and development. It is used to pressurize and purge
piping systems, detect leaks, specialized welds, and to improve breathing mixtures for
deep sea diving. Substitutes are often unavailable. And the current global supply is
constrained.

There have been some misconceptions about the helium program and this legislation to
phase it out. What I'd like to do is spend a couple of minutes to talk about what this
program is all about.

First, the helium program does not cost taxpayers money. It actually raises money. In
fact, phasing it out over the next several years instead of abruptly terminating the
program at the end of September will raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
Second, our legislation doesn't extend the Federal helium reserve indefinitely. The
program will terminate for commercial users when the supply in the reserve falls below
3 billion cubic feet. At the current rate of sales from the reserve, that would occur
within the next five or six years.

The Reserve currently supplies 40 percent of the domestic and 30 percent of global
helium demand. As our witnesses will discuss this morning, there simply are no practical

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