RE: Industry21 Nov 2025 09:44
Is supply diversification a realistic proposition?
So, what can the US and Europe do in order to boost the resilience of their titanium supply chains?
“In essence, the Russian titanium supply issue can be sorted by investing in refining capacity elsewhere. But it’s not like you can start a new refinery process titanium and say, ‘here you go, put this into your aircraft’. It’s got quite a lot of regulations and certifications to go through,” Backeberg said. “It can take up to 10 years or more to be able to produce material qualified for aerospace grade applications.”
“For companies like Airbus, Boeing, Rolls-Royce, Safran, and Pratt & Whitney, the only immediately scalable, geopolitically tolerable diversification is to go to Japan, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia for titanium sponge, increasing Western melting capacity, and obtaining some marginal gains from additive manufacturing [which is essentially resorting to 3D printing, which uses less titanium but can’t replace traditional manufacturing at scale yet – ed. note],” he continued. “US sponge production revival and increasing the scale of Indian production are strategic, long-term options, not 2026 solutions.”
Airbus signed an offtake agreement with Saudi Arabia, but to get that titanium onto an aircraft is still going to take some time. The US government, through the Department of Defense (DoD), has increased funding in supporting domestic titanium supply. However, this has been focused on recycling metal scraps. The US still lacks sponge production capacity.
“There are also some titanium production projects in the US, like IperionX, but this is mainly looking at recycling off cuttings from industrial processes, what you call secondary supply from processing plants. It’s a significant volume for some uses. They are buying five times the amount of titanium that actually ends up making parts in question,” Backeberg explained. “So, there’s quite a lot of off cut material that comes back into the system and is then re-melted. But there are losses in the process, and some of the material can’t be reused for the same types of grades because it has to get re-melted and reused.”