China's helium technology has made a major breakthrough!

China's heliumis mainly imported from Qatar. Last year, this channel acCounted for as much as 82%, making it the main overseas supply source. The United States ranks second, providing up to 9% of China's importedhelium, followed by Australia, which accounts for 8% of the supply share. Although the United States is NOt the largest import source, its leading technological strength inhelium extraction cannot be ignored. If the United States takes extreme measures to balance us in global trade, this will affect our trade activities importing from other countries and bring uncertainty.

Faced with an urgent situation, we have independently accelerated resource exploration, strengthened technological breakthroughs, and continued to make progress in recent years. The Tarim Basin on the banks of the Hotan River contains a helium-rich treasure, heralding the birth of China's first large-scale helium field. The Weihe Basin is rich in helium and has broad mining prospects. Sichuan, Qaidam, and Songliao basins also have significant helium resource exploitation potential. Several areas have been identified that are rich in helium, but the concentration is relatively thin, hovering between 0.1% and 0.3%. 

The high cost of mining is due to the difficulty in increasing concentration, but the good news is that China made significant technological progress at the end of last year, reducing the difficulty of mining.

The natural reserves of helium are not limited to natural gas, but also hidden in coal-bed methane in coal. Coal-bed methane is a non-traditional natural gas family, and its composition is more complex than traditional natural gas. Therefore, the technical challenges of extracting helium from it are numerous. The helium extraction equipment developed last year has been successfully used in the Haishiwan Coal Mine, which has rare coalbed methane resources and is rich in helium, a rare component in China. 

Since 2021, the Coal Science and Engineering Group Research Institute has overcome difficulties and devoted itself to research and development to address the challenges of extraction. After several years of hard work, it has developed a unique pressure swing adsorption fusion membrane separation and refining purification method, successfully solving the extraction problem. At the end of the year, this technology was used to purify helium, breaking the record, with a purity of over 99.999%. It was a great success and opened up a new direction for subsequent helium research.

Not only did China successfully master the technology for extracting helium from natural gas last year, it is currently also committed to developing more advanced extraction technologies, striving to achieve new breakthroughs in this field. The Institute of Process Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is working hard to develop a new technology called membrane separation coupled low-temperature adsorption. By the beginning of last year, the technology had entered a critical breakthrough period. The research team said that through the initial extraction of helium using the new technology, the purity of helium can reach 80%. Subsequently, after low-temperature deep processing, high-purity helium can be finally produced.

With the continuous progress and innovation of domestic extraction technology, our annual self-production of helium is expected to increase significantly, and is expected to reach about 40% of the total domestic consumption. Forecasts show that by 2028, about 60% of domestic helium demand may rely on overseas imports to ensure adequate supply. Even if technology makes a leap in the future, it is difficult to ensure 100% self-supply. However, as long as the self-production rate is greatly improved and nearly half is self-sufficient, we can rely on long-term reserves to get rid of the dilemma of dependence. At that time, there will be no worries about suppliers arbitrarily raising prices.