Industrial Helium Recovery

The Act governed the use of helium purification system to ensure it would not be exhausted. It also established the Federal Helium Reserve, which is a strategic reserve that holds over 1 billion cubic meters of helium gas. The gas is stored at the Cliffside Storage Facility, which is located just outside of Amarillo, Texas. The area is close to natural gas fields in southwest Kansas, plus the panhandles in both Oklahoma and Texas. These fields contain unusually high concentrations of helium.

In 1960, the Helium Act was amended to allow the U.S. Bureau of Mines to arrange for five private plants to recover helium from natural gas. To accommodate this, the Bureau built a 425-mile pipeline to collect the helium and deliver it to the Cliffside facility.

By 1995, however, the reserve was $1.4 billion in debt. In response, Congress adopted the Helium Privatization Act of 1996, which allowed the Department of the Interior to start selling off the reserve over the next decade. However, in May of 2013, the House of Representatives voted to continue government oversight of the industrial helium recovery Reserve.