Thats wonderful that they discovered new and cheaper ways to extract the titanium out the ore.
That doesn't mean a whole lot whenever the costs of producing complex weldaments, and other aircraft parts. Extremely tight tolerances are required. The machines we use are impressive. 3 & 4 axis CNC machines and 4 & 5 axis waterjets. A fully equiped chem mill line, and a "hot forming dept."
When you say Ti metals is going to be cheaper to get from say, TIMET, that might be true, but customers are going to want their parts to be made cheaply.
Thats not going to happen because it's definately very difficult to work with, and thats not coming from a welding standpoint. I go to work every day seeing the difficulties of working with the stuff. 95% of our sales is Titanium parts. Try chem milling, thats alot of fun to determine
material removal + - .0010. Not easy to do.
The thing about titanium is that welding it is the easy part. You can't do much with it without the correct tooling. You had better work in a well equipped shop to make even any profit of the reduced cost of Ti that is coming in the future.

The funny thing is I never requested any info from them(TIMET).
I work in a fairly small shop. I'm one of three welders. I have 3 different tig machines all to myself. I just don't troubleshoot weld problems but every fab process available. Blending, getting parts to form correctly, painting, sandblasting, chem cleaning, ect.

The question I asked about the ELI rod I already knew the chemical properties of the alloys. I was just seeing who out there might directly work with it on an everyday basis like production.

Until the costs of production goes down then there's no way that there will be ANY need for new "Ti welders". It's not cost efficient to use it on an everyday to day basis, yet. That might come, but not anytime soon!