There must be other beneficial use, which I think multinational companies hide when they negotiate royalty payment to governments in the developing world. Kindly elaborate the answer to my question more so on the high value uses of the mineral.
Yes TiO2 is used in paint industry as it has high refractive index BUT not in raw form!!! TiO2 particles are coated by alumina and zinc oxide to give it an acceptable dispersion characteristics. I personally tried both coated and uncoated form and didnt get good results with latter. However TiO2 is widely used in food and paper and metal industries. Recently it has become more popular as it is started to be used in solar energy panels.
Suggest you start with the following Wikipedia article section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanium#Applications
In terms of price per kilogram, the highest-value applications are in dental and surgical implants (subsection of the above section).
Fortunately even relatively simple Ti metals -- commercially pure grades, with no alloying elements, just careful control of oxygen and hydrogen content and impurities -- are used frequently in dental surgery. Therefore, production and sale of commercially pure Ti grade rod and bar stock to implant dental manufacturers represents a market with a high potential return on investment.
The short answer is that there are lot of sources of titanium dioxide but only a relative small demand for the metal. The less impurities associated with the oxide makes it easier to produce the metal, reducing processing cost. TiCl4 is the feed the oxide is converted too for metal production. We tested a number of sources with varying impurities. Iron was one element that caused a lot of problems in the process.
@ Jasbir Khosha - Re demand for Ti metal.
I guess it depends on what you mean by small.
"...the global aerospace industry, which represents an annual output volume of 130 million pounds of titanium."
From: https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/titanium.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/Press_Releases/09_15_14BIHLMAN’S_RESEARCH_S.pdf
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