It is cheap now compared to what it is going to cost..
Building more stuff to make more or via a different method costs money that again raises the price to pay for the infrastructure.
Do you think you will ever see gasoline ever costing $0.25/gallon again? Or even $1.00? $2.00?
Adjusted for inflation gasoline is actually not too bad. Per energy.gov and using all 2015 dollars because that's where the data came from but will also put December 2022 dollars per BLS.gov
1950 gas was $0.27/gal or $2.14 in 2015 dollars or $3.41 in todays dollars.
We should probably start in 1980 or so when the gasoline was more analogous to what we have today with additives and what not
1980 was $1.19/$2.95/$4.54
1990 was $1.15/$1.89/$2.64 *wish we could go back to that from 2020...*,
2000 $1.51/$2.02/$2.65
Starting in 2006 the average price jumped up to $2.59/$3.00/$3.88 and adjusted for inflation it hasn't really gone back down below $3.00/gal average since. Couple of blips but adjusted for inflation we are actually trending down since 2006. In terms of absolute dollars we obviously won't see it go back down to the numbers you quoted, but we may well see it go back down to inflation adjusted prices.
Basically todays gas price is the same as it was in 1950 when it was around $0.25/gal.
Now, helium is obviously mad and is up hundreds of percent in the last 15 years but after having discussed it with a senior VP of Airgas, they actually aren't making that much money on helium and really have no huge motivation to do it other than the government labs basically say they have to. It's very expensive to capture and filter out and generally irritating so if there is a commercial scale source that doesn't involve reclaiming exhaust gases from natural gas harvesting then it may well come down if it is an easy to capture waste product, obviously provided there is no radiation issues with it.
