| ISSUE 005 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone counting American titanium is counting melt capacity. An $868 million mill was announced for Fayetteville, North Carolina, in July 2024, and a titanium melt plant is under construction at Ravenswood, West Virginia. Both of them melt metal that has already been reduced to sponge somewhere else. | |
| Titanium sponge is the porous metal left when titanium tetrachloride is reduced with molten magnesium. It is melted into ingot and rolled into plate, bar and sheet. Aerospace takes most of it, and the rest goes into armour, chemical processing, marine hardware, medical implants and power generation. | |
| The United States produced no titanium sponge in 2025, and net import reliance stood at 100 percent, the US Geological Survey reported in February 2026. Imports came to an estimated 44,000 tonnes, above the previous high of 40,300 tonnes in 2023, with Japan supplying 73 percent of them through July. Titanium sits on the Interior Department’s final 2025 critical minerals list, published on 7 November 2025, and on 14 January 2026 the President concurred with a finding that imports of processed critical minerals threaten national security while directing negotiations rather than tariffs. | |
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| PLATE · MACHINE TOOL BUILDERS, UNITED STATES, 1983–1986 |
| In March 1983 the National Machine Tool Builders Association asked the Secretary of Commerce for import quotas, on the view that machine tool imports threatened the national security. Secretary Baldrige reported in February 1984. The file went back for revised mobilisation and defence planning factors, and a second report arrived in March 1986. |
| Reagan gave his answer on 20 May 1986. He would seek voluntary restraint agreements with Taiwan, West Germany, Japan and Switzerland on machining centres, lathes, punching and shearing machines and milling machines. An action plan came with them, including up to $5 million a year for three years of federal matching funds for a private sector technology centre. |
| The finding and the remedy sat at different layers. Import levels are a question of who ships what in a given year; a tool works is a capital asset with a build time measured in years. The United States led world machine tool production in 1981 at $5.1 billion and ranked fifth in 2022 at $5.9 billion, with China first at $27.1 billion, on figures published by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in December 2025. |
| PLATE · TITANIUM SPONGE REDUCTION PLANT, ROWLEY, UTAH | |||
| On 24 August 2016 Allegheny Technologies announced the indefinite idling of its titanium sponge plant at Rowley, Utah, a facility the US Geological Survey rates at 10,900 tonnes a year. The company expected pre-tax non-cash impairment charges of about $470 million on idled facilities. | |||
| The reason was in the same release. Global sponge capacity had been added over several years and demand for industrial grade titanium was weak, so sponge, including aerospace quality sponge, could be bought from qualified global producers under long-term supply agreements at prices below the production cost at Rowley. ATI signed those agreements. | |||
| ATI said the plant would be idled in a manner that allowed a restart if market conditions supported one. The US Geological Survey’s February 2026 assessment lists Rowley as idle since 2016 and the 12,600 tonne a year plant at Henderson, Nevada, as idle since 2020. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
