Future Explained

TiBeRIUM: Rethinking Titanium and Beryllium Production Through International Research

Making titanium the way industry has for eighty years means putting carbon into the process. TiBeRIUM is an international Horizon Europe consortium coordinated by TU Bergakademie Freiberg, bringing together research and industrial partners from Europe, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The project is investigating whether hydrogen can help take it out. The chemistry makes that swap harder than it sounds.

A researcher handles sample crucibles in one of EKTU's materials laboratories. Credit: D. Serikbayev East Kazakhstan Technical University.

Titanium and beryllium are not niche materials. Titanium's ratio of strength to weight is why aircraft frames, jet engines and fasteners are built from it, and its biocompatibility is why it ends up in hip and dental implants. Beryllium's stiffness and low weight put it in aerospace and defence components, X-ray windows and telecoms hardware, though it is toxic to handle, one reason so few companies produce it at all. Both metals are strategically important precisely because the properties that make them useful also make them difficult to substitute in aerospace, defence, electronics and other demanding applications.

What both have in common is a production process that is expensive in carbon as well as cash. TiBeRIUM is an international Horizon Europe consortium coordinated by TU Bergakademie Freiberg, bringing together research and industrial partners from Europe, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. TiBeRIUM is a consortium-wide research and innovation effort combining complementary expertise from universities, research organisations and industrial partners. D. Serikbayev East Kazakhstan Technical University (EKTU) participates in TiBeRIUM as one of the Kazakh research partners.

How titanium is made today, and why hydrogen can't simply swap in

Titanium production has run on the Kroll process since the 1940s, and carbon and magnesium do different jobs in it. In the first stage, carbochlorination, titanium dioxide reacts with chlorine and carbon to form titanium tetrachloride, producing CO2 and CO. In the second stage, molten magnesium is the actual reducing agent, converting that titanium tetrachloride into metallic titanium. A 2024 review in Minerals puts the total energy cost at 55 to 360 megajoules per kilogram of titanium, against a theoretical minimum of 16.92 MJ/kg, with electrical energy, much of it consumed by magnesium chloride electrolysis, making up two-thirds of the total. Swapping in hydrogen looks like the obvious fix, but the same review closes that door directly: "thermodynamically, it is impossible to reduce TiO2 into Ti metal using molecular hydrogen." Magnesium remains the actual reducing agent in that picture; researchers are instead targeting the carbon-intensive carbochlorination step itself, or pursuing an entirely different reduction route altogether.

What researchers are trying instead

Researchers are attacking the problem in several ways. Two approaches illustrate why replacing carbon with hydrogen is more complicated than it sounds. Hydrogen plasma smelting reduction ionises hydrogen gas into plasma, a far more reactive state, to attempt a reduction molecular hydrogen cannot manage. Hydrogen-assisted magnesiothermic reduction takes a different route: magnesium still does the actual reducing, inside a hydrogen atmosphere at 600 to 800°C, producing high-purity titanium with oxygen content below 0.15 percent by weight. Within TiBeRIUM, researchers are investigating advanced processing routes in parallel, including hydrogen-based reduction and electrochemical approaches, aiming for a 90 percent cut in carbon footprint against conventional production, according to the project's published targets.

How far has the science actually got?

Not very far, and that is the honest, useful part of the result. A 2025 Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials study, published in the Journal of Sustainable Metallurgy, ran five ilmenite reduction experiments using a 10 percent hydrogen, 90 percent argon plasma over 150 to 750 seconds. Iron recovery passed 70 percent after 750 seconds, with the resulting metallic droplet containing more than 92 percent iron. Titanium itself was not reduced: it remained concentrated as TiO2 in the slag, because, the researchers found, the plasma temperature at that hydrogen concentration fell well short of what titanium oxide reduction actually requires, closer to 14,000 kelvin by theoretical estimates than anything the experiment reached.

What's in it for Kazakhstan, and for Europe

Two supply chains want an answer to the same chemistry question, for different reasons. Titanium and beryllium both sit on the EU's critical raw materials list, and the bloc's Critical Raw Materials Act caps any single country's share of a strategic material at 65 percent of its annual needs, part of the policy backdrop for funding new, lower-carbon sources such as TiBeRIUM.

Kazakhstan's stake is different, and it is the stronger thread running through Rakhmetullina's own account of the project. Its opportunity is to move further up the value chain, rather than simply supplying mineral resources for processing elsewhere. "We hope this center will help our regional economy transition from being a raw material center to an industrial technology center where new technologies are actively developed," she said. A reduction process that works domestically would let Kazakhstan capture more of that processing itself. The European partnership is how she frames the path there: "One of the projects we are working on is the Horizon Tiberium project in cooperation with European universities. This is a good example of a partnership developing the technological infrastructure of our region... it also means the expertise of our researchers across the region develops every year due to this collaboration."

What would it take to actually replace the Kroll process?

Likely years. The Minerals review concludes that hydrogen-based and other alternative reduction processes "still require further research to scale them up to an industrial and commercial level," and estimates it may take "a few more decades" before any of them compete with the Kroll process commercially. TiBeRIUM itself is aiming to move several of these technologies toward industrial demonstration, titanium routes from TRL 5 to TRL 7, beryllium from TRL 4 to TRL 6, according to the project's own published targets. The peer-reviewed results above concern titanium specifically; TiBeRIUM's beryllium work relies on separate processing chemistry, without equivalent independent published research behind it yet.

What's next

TiBeRIUM's own description frames this as redesigning a value chain, not scaling up one experiment. For titanium, that means investigating advanced processing routes, including hydrogen-based reduction and electrochemical approaches, using raw materials from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. For beryllium, the project will investigate advanced extraction, separation and refining approaches using relevant Kazakh raw materials in cooperation with the consortium's research and industrial partners. The Max Planck experiments, and the wider hydrogen-reduction research they belong to, are the science one part of that redesign is currently betting on.

Institutions in this article: D. Serikbayev East Kazakhstan Technical University; TU Bergakademie Freiberg; Ulba Metallurgical Plant JSC; Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials.