The Geology of Titanium: Mostly Mined for Paint, Not Metal
Titanium ore comes from ilmenite and rutile in heavy mineral sands, deposits whose main buyer is the pigment industry, not the metal industry.
Titanium’s geology is dominated by a genuinely different market than the one most people associate with the element: over 95% of mined titanium becomes white TiO2 pigment, covered on this material’s application-wise page, not aircraft-grade metal, and that demand split shapes which deposits actually get developed.
Heavy mineral sands, a placer-style deposit
Ilmenite and rutile, titanium’s main ore minerals, concentrate the same way cassiterite and gold do, covered on tin’s and gold’s own geology pages: they are dense enough to survive weathering and transport and accumulate in coastal and river sand deposits, a genuine placer-style origin rather than a hard-rock vein setting.
Why this is not where metal-grade titanium comes from
Because the pigment market dominates ore demand so completely, mine investment decisions follow pigment industry economics, covered on the application-wise page, not aerospace metal demand, even though aerospace is the application most people picture when they hear “titanium.” The metal-specific supply chain, covered on this material’s mining and supply chain pages, runs through a narrower, separate set of countries entirely.
Sources: deposit-type framing draws on standard economic geology references (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries); production figures reference the production data elsewhere on this site.