Helium Shortage Cuts India's MRI Scans to Emergencies Only

Wenlock District Hospital in Mangaluru, Karnataka, has cut its MRI service back to emergency cases only after its liquid helium reserve fell to roughly one week of operating stock. The problem was raised with the state health minister during a review meeting held at the hospital, and officials confirmed that the scanner, which is run by a private operator under a partnership arrangement, cannot be guaranteed continuous supply.

The technical constraint is specific to the age of the equipment. The magnet installed at Wenlock in 2017 needs a liquid helium top up roughly every three months, while systems built after 2019 hold their coolant far longer and typically need attention only once every two years. Liquid helium keeps the superconducting magnet close to absolute zero, and if the reserve is fully lost the operator faces a bill of about Rs 70 lakh, close to 80,000 US dollars, to re-energise the machine. A scan at the hospital is priced at around Rs 2,500, so the restart cost alone represents thousands of subsidised examinations. To limit the damage, the health department has been asked to arrange for patients referred from Wenlock under the AB-ArK scheme to be scanned at KMC Hospital without extra charges.

The origin of the squeeze sits outside India. Joint United States and Israeli strikes on Iran at the end of February 2026 triggered a regional war, and Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor that carries almost all Qatari gas exports. On 2 March QatarEnergy stopped production of liquefied natural gas and associated products at Ras Laffan Industrial City and Mesaieed, and two days later it declared force majeure to its buyers. Missile strikes on 18 and 19 March then damaged LNG trains and the Pearl gas to liquids plant, removing about 17 percent of Qatar's LNG export capacity with a repair horizon of three to five years.

Helium is not drilled for on its own. It is separated as a by-product of LNG processing, so a halt at Ras Laffan halts helium output as well. Qatar's Helium 1 and Helium 2 units account for close to 30 percent of world capacity, and their shutdown removed the single largest block of supply the market has ever lost at once.

The situation has not resolved since the spring. A peace agreement signed on 17 June allowed the first LNG tanker to cross the Strait of Hormuz on 19 June, and QatarEnergy began a staged restart. That attempt suffered a serious setback on the evening of 21 June, when an internal explosion during restart operations at Ras Laffan killed and injured dozens of workers and pushed the timetable back again. Satellite heat signatures have shown activity at only three of the site's fourteen LNG trains since early June. QatarEnergy's force majeure is now running into its fourth month, and the company has told at least one European buyer that its notice will extend to mid-August.

July brought two further shocks. Fighting in the Gulf resumed in early July, and on 10 July China's Ministry of Commerce and General Administration of Customs imposed an immediate temporary ban on helium exports in order to protect domestic chipmakers. Russia had already tightened its own export controls, which run to the end of 2027 and cut Asian allocation quotas to about 40 percent of 2025 levels. Three of the six major industrial gas producers have moved to formal allocation, and distributors are rationing volumes, prioritising healthcare and semiconductor customers while cutting balloon, laboratory and other low priority users. Spot prices have risen between 40 and 100 percent since March, and imported tube trailer helium in China has traded at close to triple its year earlier level.

India is unusually exposed because it has no domestic reserves. The country consumes roughly 0.15 billion cubic feet of helium a year, about 2.3 percent of world demand, and buys most of it from Qatar. Industry bodies including the Medical Technology Association of India have warned since March that a prolonged outage would raise the cost of running scanners and slow new installations. A new magnet needs around 1,500 litres of liquid helium for its initial fill, and manufacturers have told Indian radiologists that installation schedules are the first thing to slip. Most imaging facilities in the country carry only 15 to 20 days of consumables inventory, which leaves little margin when a delivery is delayed.

Wenlock is the clearest case so far, but it is not isolated. Hospitals in Bengaluru have been tracking their helium inventories since March and holding back non-urgent scans where refill dates are close. Private chains with newer sealed magnets are largely insulated, since those systems are shipped filled and do not need periodic top ups. The exposure is concentrated in government and district hospitals running scanners bought between 2015 and 2019, exactly the machines that consume the most coolant and serve the patients least able to pay private rates.

Equipment makers are pushing sealed and low helium designs as the structural answer. Philips has installed more than a thousand of its sealed 1.5T magnets worldwide, Siemens Healthineers markets dry cooled systems that avoid bulk refills, and the Bengaluru startup Voxelgrids builds imaging systems that do not depend on large helium volumes. None of that helps an installed base of several thousand conventional scanners over the next twelve months.

The incident remains active. Analysts expect the south site at Ras Laffan to stay offline at least until the end of summer 2026, with the damaged trains out for years rather than months. Helium consultants are openly debating whether this is a temporary shock or the start of a multi year deficit, with an initial gap of about 30 percent easing to a structural shortfall of 10 to 15 percent once allocation and demand destruction work through. For Indian hospitals the practical consequence is unchanged for now, which is higher refill costs, longer waits for deliveries and triage of MRI slots toward emergency and oncology cases.