There has to be a better way to make titanium

Summary

On paper, titanium should be the world's #1 structural metal. There isn’t another metal with such great overall properties– incredible toughness and specific strength, light weight, exceptional corrosion resistance, and performance even at extreme temperatures. Titanium is also abundant, the 9th most common element in the earth's crust—cheap enough as ore to use in paint pigment and plastic filler[1]. And making titanium metal should take only half as much energy as making aluminum[2]. It should be cheap and ubiquitous.Titanium was born for war—and in particular, to make war machines go as fast as possible. Its first major use was as the main structural material for the world's fastest planes (A-12 and SR-71) and submarines (Papa class).But in reality, titanium is a rounding error in the world metals market – produced 5000x less than iron and almost 200x less than aluminum. Half a century after the US and Soviet governments conjured a commercial titanium industry from scratch to feed their cold war machines, we’ve seen virtually no progress in making the metal cheap or abundant. Learning curves that manifested quickly for aluminum and stainless steel simply didn’t appear for Ti— its “idiot index”, the cost of Ti parts as a multiple of the cost of ore and embodied energy, remains >10x that of steel. At $25-$50/kg, titanium is just too expensive to be widely used.The total lack of progress keeps titanium in a reverse-Goldilocks zone where it loses to steel and aluminum on cost, and to composites on weight[3], and so is used only where its lightness and toughness are absolutely essential. Outside of aerospace, defense, corrosion-resistant process equipment, artificial joints and premium sporting goods, titanium is practically irrelevant.‍Why is titanium so expensive?Here’s how we get Ti today:We mine TiO2 as ilmenite ore, which is widespread and fairly concentrated at 40-65% TiO2. (~$1/kg Ti)The ilmenite is purified to synthetic rutile (90-95% TiO2) (~$2/kg Ti) then ca...