Not really. Helium is extracted from natural gas fields. It is continuously produced inside Earth by the decay of Radon; the alpha particles from the decay bec

Not really. Helium is extracted from natural gas fields. It is continuously produced inside Earth by the decay of Radon; the alpha particles from the decay become helium once they acquire 2 electrons. Since helium is light, it keeps seeping upwards. Geological formations that trap natural gas will also trap helium. Some fields have a lot of helium. There's one in the US that has 7% of it, but that's an extreme case. There are plenty in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas with around 1-2% helium. According to the US Geological Survey [1] the average price for private consumers for crude helium was less than $5 per cubic meter. The total reserves were a bit more than 20 billion m3, split into various levels of confidence (measured, probable, possible, speculative). You can read that to mean that essentially the reserves of helium are infinite. Why? Oil and natural gas companies are all about reserves. Their reserves are the assets against which they raise debt, there's an entire finance area about oil and gas exploration and production. The best reserves are those that are producing right now. Below that are those other levels of reserves. The more certain a reserve is, the more money you can raise against it to finance your activities. But elevating a reserve from "speculative" to "possible" or "probable" is costly, and risky. Companies do that based on a long term plan. But they do it. Journalists like to take the current level of reserves, divide by the current usage, and voila, the world has only x years of resource y left. Where generally x is a fairly small number, like 10. But years pass, and that x does not dwindle to zero. People think that somehow there were some new and unexpected discoveries, but otherwise, we'll still run out of the resource in a few years. But it's not like that. The reserves get renewed as part of the normal business. Not "renewed" as in "renewable", but just as in elevating some reserves from possible to probable, some from speculative to possible, and finally expanding the speculative reserves too. Anyway, even at the level of a few billion cubic meters of helium, we'd still have enough helium for a few thousand of these ginormous airships. [1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-helium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-helium.pdf