USHR

Paragraph 1 — background

The United States government was, for most of a century, a helium dealer

In 1925 Congress decided that helium was a matter of national defence, because airships ran on it and the country did not intend to be caught short of airships. It built a federal reserve for the gas in Amarillo, Texas, pumped it into a porous rock formation eleven hundred metres down, and kept filling it.

The airships stopped being a strategic concern almost immediately. The reserve did not stop. By the modern era it held roughly one billion cubic feet of helium and supplied close to a third of everything the United States used — not for blimps by then, but for MRI scanners, rockets, and semiconductor fabrication, which cannot run without it.

Congress ordered it sold in the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013. The sale took eleven years to execute. In June 2024 the Bureau of Land Management handed the whole system — the field, the refinery, and 425 miles of pipeline across Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma — to a private industrial gas company. The Treasury booked $460 million.

So: the strategic stockpile that existed to guarantee a supply of the one gas the chip industry cannot substitute was liquidated by the government, on a schedule set in 2013, arriving precisely as the world started building data centres as fast as it could pour concrete.

Click any redaction to declassify it.

Paragraph 2 — disposition of assets

The ledger

Paragraph 3 — sources

All of it is on a .gov

This is not a story anyone had to invent. The agency that ran the reserve published the press releases announcing that it had sold it.

Paragraph 4 — purpose

Why it’s a coin

Because a government spent ninety-nine years hoarding the gas that makes balloons float, on the theory that it might need airships, and then sold the entire thing to private industry immediately before the semiconductor buildout of the century. There is no lesson in that. It is just extremely funny, and it is entirely true.