[Oscar]

Argon is produced by air liquification. I doubt that we'll ever run out. Helium on the other hand comes out of the ground and is finite. That's why it is so expensive and getting more so all the time. Unless they find a way to capture it out of the atmosphere, we will run out

Yup, usually from processing natural gas and oil. The funny part is that helium is produced from radioactive decay of thorium (which we use as an alloying element in electrodes in TIG) and uranium, and at the moment we are at their mercy, as we cannot control it. The atmosphere has very little helium that we could extract; most helium just escapes into outer space. Our only hope is for the nuclear fusion reactors to finally go online as actual power producing stations. The main byproduct of nuclear fusion of deuterium and tritium nuclei is helium nuclei. We're close, but it will be another 20-30 years perhaps before the tokamaks and other designs finally become mainstream power plants.