Francis Wedin arrived in Western Australia 15 years ago as a young English engineer with ambitions in gold mining. Today he is overseeing what has become Australia’s largest investment in European manufacturing — a $3.9 billion lithium project under construction in the Rhine Valley outside Frankfurt that is scheduled to begin production in 2028.
The pivot from hard rock gold to geothermal lithium extraction in southern Germany began with a magazine article. After reading about lithium’s potential in The Economist more than a decade ago, Wedin became convinced that battery demand for electric vehicles would create a viable development opportunity — particularly for a greener, lower-cost lithium product produced closer to European customers. His first lithium venture in Western Australia had been acquired by Pilbara Minerals in 2017, freeing him to pursue something different.
The Upper Rhine Valley delivered what he was looking for: hot lithium-bearing brine in natural underground reservoirs with good chemistry, existing infrastructure and wells, cheap geothermal energy, and proximity to European automotive and battery manufacturing. Vulcan’s direct lithium extraction technology pumps brine from underground and captures lithium chloride by attaching lithium salts to an absorbent resin. The resulting lithium chloride is then processed into battery-grade lithium hydroxide and supplied to customers — Vulcan already holds offtake agreements with battery maker LG, cathode producer Umicore, carmaker Stellantis and trader Glencore. The project’s geothermal heat output also supplies cheap green power and heating to local communities, making it a rare mining development that has attracted neighbourhood support.
The project’s first phase targets 24,000 tonnes of lithium hydroxide per year — enough for approximately 500,000 EV batteries. Wedin deliberately developed the extraction technology in-house. “The technology to do this extraction seemed to mostly come from China, so that was a risk,” he said. “This was really Europe standing up for its own critical raw materials supply chain with Aussie lithium extraction know-how.”
The financing and equity structure reflects the breadth of institutional confidence in the project. German construction company Hochtief and Siemens are equity investors alongside customer Stellantis, while Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting holds a 4% stake. The German government made its first-ever equity investment in a critical minerals project through KfW’s fund. Export Finance Australia played a pivotal role in helping Vulcan secure financing from the European Investment Bank, its Canadian equivalent and a range of commercial banks, with the package signed last December.
Wedin credits Australia’s retail investor base — “mums and dads” — with providing the early-stage capital that allowed Vulcan to develop its technology and prove its concept before institutional investors arrived. He expressed concern that recent federal budget changes to capital gains tax treatment would disadvantage the next generation of junior explorers seeking the same pathway.
Lumina Metals shares surged as much as 46% on their Warsaw Stock Exchange debut on Tuesday, reflecting strong domestic investor demand for a company that Poland’s prime minister says could more than double the country’s copper production capacity and underpin a broader national ambition to become a leading European supplier of the metal.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk attended the Warsaw listing, describing Lumina’s projects as presenting “tremendous opportunities for Poland for a dramatic increase in copper and silver production capacity.” The stock’s strong performance in Warsaw followed a C$406.2 million initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange in April, with Polish investors who could not participate in the Canadian offering driving significant demand at the local debut.
The company’s Nowa Sól project in southwestern Poland covers 120 square kilometres of the Northern Copper Belt near KGHM’s existing mining and processing operations. Since the deposit’s discovery in 2014, Lumina has completed more than 51,000 metres of drilling and outlined a measured and indicated resource of 604 million tonnes grading 1.24% copper and 38 grams per tonne silver — one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper and silver deposits. In early May, Lumina signed a letter of intent with state-controlled KGHM Polska Miedz to discuss future copper concentrate supply from the project.
Lumina plans to develop its projects near KGHM’s existing infrastructure, requiring a combined $6.4 billion investment. Average annual copper-equivalent production during the first decade of operation is projected at 390,000 tonnes — matching KGHM’s current entire annual copper output in Poland. Poland is already the EU’s largest copper producer through KGHM’s operations, and a successful Lumina buildout would effectively double national capacity.
The developments support a government strategy to create a Polish “Copper Valley” extending the country’s role beyond mining into refining, manufacturing and broader value-added industries, reducing dependence on unprocessed metal exports and positioning Poland as a strategic supplier for Europe’s electrification agenda.
Lumina CEO Jordan Pandoff welcomed the government dialogue but issued a direct challenge on fiscal policy. “At the same time, if you wish to see the next generation of greenfield mines developed in Poland, further progress will be required to ensure the fiscal framework becomes competitive,” he said, noting that the current copper tax regime continues to discourage higher production levels despite some recent relief measures.
Something significant has shifted. In the span of eighteen months, Central Asia has moved from a footnote in Washington and Brussels policy documents to a headline. The Caspian Policy Center’s new report — ‘Central Asia and the New Critical Minerals Frontier: Progress in Reshaping Global Supply Chains’ — is the latest in a wave of think-tank, government, and investor analyses arriving at the same conclusion: the region’s critical mineral resources are strategically indispensable.
This analysis cuts through the optimism to ask the harder questions. What has actually changed on the ground? Which players are genuinely committed versus which are signing MoUs for photo opportunities? And by 2030, what will Central Asia’s real role be in the global supply of critical raw materials?
This analysis draws on the CPC report, the EU Institute for Security Studies’ Chaillot Paper on China’s critical raw material weapon, the C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue in Astana on 10 June 2026, the Carnegie Endowment’s analysis of the Middle Corridor, the CFR’s report on leapfrogging China’s dominance, and the Forum’s accumulated perspective from running MINEX Asia, MINEX Europe, and MINEX Eurasia.
1. The Geopolitical Wake-Up: Real, But Overdue
The CPC report is unambiguous: critical mineral supply chains are no longer an economic issue — they are a national security and geopolitical issue. China controls approximately 90% of global rare earth refining, 60% of lithium processing, and over 70% of cobalt refining. By 2022, China controlled 100% of global graphite processing. These are not numbers that have crept up on policymakers. They have been visible for years. What has changed is the willingness to act — and the nature of Beijing’s own use of this leverage.
The EUISS Chaillot Paper published in May 2026 makes for sober reading. Beijing’s sharp reduction of critical raw material exports in 2025 — covering germanium, gallium, antimony, bismuth, and rare earths — was not a one-off retaliation against US semiconductor restrictions. It evolved into a systematic geo-economic weapon. The paper documents how China used its export licensing regime to extract information about Western defence-industrial networks, coerce EU trade policy on electric vehicle tariffs, and deter Japan from strengthening its defence posture on Taiwan.
What is less widely understood is how the apparent ‘détente’ of late 2025 conceals a structural tightening. The October 2025 rare earth export controls were suspended for one year as part of the Xi–Trump Busan summit deal — they are due to re-activate in November 2026. Critically, the April 2025 controls remain fully in force; only the October tranche was suspended. More consequentially, China’s export licensing architecture now includes extraterritorial provisions that allow Beijing to restrict re-exports of products containing Chinese-origin rare earth content even between third countries. The détente is not a resolution. It is a one-year suppression of symptoms while the structural disease remains untreated.
China does not merely hold rocks in the ground. It holds the refinery, the processing plant, the magnet manufacturer, and the pricing mechanism. Owning a deposit in Central Asia without access to non-Chinese processing is like owning an oil field with no pipeline.
This is the fundamental reality that too many Western policy documents still dance around. The CPC report is admirably direct about the midstream gap — the fact that even where Western investors enter Central Asian mining, the ore typically still travels east for processing. Closing that gap requires not just exploration investment but decades of patient capital in refining and processing infrastructure. That capital has not yet materialised at the required scale.
2. The MoU Inflation Problem
What should concern anyone serious about this sector is the following. The United States, the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Türkiye are all engaged in what the Forum terms ‘MoU inflation’ with Central Asian governments. The CPC report catalogues a remarkable number of bilateral frameworks, memoranda of understanding, and strategic partnerships signed since 2025. The C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue in Astana on 10 June produced more of the same.
These instruments are not worthless — they establish political will and create frameworks for future action. Kazakhstan’s Minister of Industry, Yersayin Nagaspayev, rightly highlighted that Kazakhstan has adopted a new Subsoil and Subsoil Use Code, implemented a ‘first come, first served’ licensing principle, launched a unified digital subsoil platform, and fully adopted CRIRSCO international reporting standards since 2024. Investment in geological exploration has tripled since 2018, exceeding one billion dollars. Western majors including BHP (via its Xplor programme), First Quantum Minerals, Ivanhoe Mines, Teck Resources, Fortescue, and US-based Cove Capital have entered the Kazakh market. Chinese companies are moving faster and at greater scale: Zijin Mining completed a $1.2 billion acquisition of Kazakhstan’s Raygorodok gold mine in October 2025, adding to its existing operations at the Taldybulak Levoberezhny mine in Kyrgyzstan and the Jilau and Taror gold mines in Tajikistan — a three-country “Gold Triangle” across Central Asia. East Hope Group — one of China’s largest private industrial conglomerates and a top-ten global aluminium producer — is advancing a $12.6 billion fully integrated aluminium cluster in Kazakhstan’s Kostanay and Aktobe regions: bauxite mining, a two million tonne per year alumina refinery, a one million tonne per year primary aluminium smelter, and a captive one-gigawatt power plant. The project framework was signed with the Kazakh government in February 2025 and geological exploration of eleven deposits is already under way. If delivered, it would be one of the largest single foreign direct investment projects in Kazakhstan’s industrial history. China National Gold Group has signed an MoU with Uzbekistan covering geological exploration and technology transfer. These are real signals of intent — though the Western and Chinese signals point in very different directions.
But the gap between MoU and mine is measured not in months but in decades. The CPC report states this plainly: developing a major mining project from inception to production can take twenty or more years. Processing and refining require additional capital beyond the mine gate. Political cycles — in Washington, in Brussels, and in Central Asian capitals — run on four-to-five-year horizons. China’s BRI financing runs on twenty-year horizons. This asymmetry is not a detail. It is the central challenge of Western engagement with Central Asia’s mineral sector.
The question is not whether Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, or Tajikistan have the minerals. They do. The question is whether Western partners have the institutional patience, the risk appetite, and the financing instruments to compete with a counterparty that thinks in decades, not electoral cycles.
The US International Development Finance Corporation’s recent approval of USD 2.5 billion in strategic investments and the C5+1 roadmap for geological exploration, mining and processing, and global value chain integration are positive steps. But the gap between announced capital and deployed capital in this region remains historically wide. The Forum has documented this cycle repeatedly: enthusiasm peaks around major geopolitical events, and then the deals stall in permitting, due diligence, or financing committees.
3. Where the Real Business Opportunities Are
The following sets out where genuine commercial opportunities are opening up, rather than where the diplomatic activity is concentrated.
3.1 Midstream Processing — The Untapped Prize
The CPC report’s section on closing the midstream gap is the most commercially important part of the document. Central Asia produces raw ore and exports it, largely to China, which captures the value-added margin in processing and refining. The governments in the region know this and want to change it. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have explicitly stated they want to develop industrial clusters that capture more of the value chain domestically.
For investors and mining companies, this creates a specific opportunity: joint ventures in processing and refining that give Central Asian governments the industrial development they want and give Western offtake partners the supply chain security they need. This is not easy — it requires technology transfer, long-term offtake agreements, and patient capital — but it is where the alignment of interests is strongest. Companies with refining technology and Western governments with DFI instruments should be looking at this window seriously.
3.2 The Middle Corridor — A Structural Shift in Logistics, With a Named Weak Link
Freight along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route has increased fivefold in seven years, reaching 4.1 million tonnes across the Caspian in 2024 alone. The war in Ukraine has accelerated this, but the trend is structural. For critical minerals, the Middle Corridor offers an alternative to Chinese-controlled logistics networks. Kazakhstan’s commitment to developing this route is serious, and the Hormuz blockade in place since February 2026 — with oil above $110 a barrel at the time of writing — is providing a live demonstration of exactly why overland alternatives to maritime choke points matter.
But the optimism around the corridor needs to be tempered by a specific and underreported vulnerability. Georgia is currently the corridor’s only gateway to Europe. Until the TRIPP route via Armenia and Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan exclave becomes operational, Tbilisi is structurally irreplaceable. Yet the Georgian government has just cut funding for the Anaklia deep-sea port — identified by both the World Bank and the EU’s Trans-European Transport Network as the corridor’s central infrastructure priority — from 150 million lari to 50 million lari. Georgia’s existing port capacity is already nearing exhaustion.
The explanation for this decision is contested, but one strand is disturbing: after a Western-led consortium lost the Anaklia contract in 2020, the Georgian government selected as its preferred contractor a Chinese-Singaporean firm currently under US sanctions. There is a credible case that Beijing, which benefits from the Northern (Russian) Corridor and has no strategic interest in the Middle Corridor displacing it, is quietly applying pressure on Tbilisi to limit the western terminus’s capacity.
Kazakhstan’s position in this corridor is more structural than is commonly appreciated: approximately 80% of all rail cargo travelling between China and Europe already passes through Kazakhstan, making it not an emerging alternative route but the existing backbone of Eurasian overland trade. The commercial opportunity in the corridor’s logistics and infrastructure layer is real — port capacity at Aktau and Kuryk, rail and intermodal connectivity through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Türkiye — but companies positioning in this space need to price in the Georgia risk. Türkiye’s role as the corridor’s westernmost reliable node therefore becomes more, not less, strategically significant if Georgia continues to under-invest.
3.3 Uranium — The Quiet Giant
Central Asia produces approximately 50% of global uranium. Kazakhstan alone, through Kazatomprom, dominates global supply. The US Geological Survey has added uranium to its updated list of critical minerals. As the energy security debate in Europe and the US re-centres on nuclear power as a baseload complement to renewables, and as advanced reactor programmes (SMRs in particular) gather momentum, uranium supply security from non-Russian, non-Chinese sources becomes a premium.
The investment thesis for uranium in Kazakhstan is arguably more mature and more deliverable than for rare earths, precisely because the infrastructure already exists. The opportunity is in midstream — converting, enriching, and fabricating fuel outside of Russian-controlled supply chains — and in ensuring Western utilities have long-term offtake agreements with Kazakh producers.
3.3a Titanium — The Overlooked Aerospace Play
Titanium rarely features in critical minerals analysis focused on Central Asia, yet Kazakhstan accounts for approximately 20% of the global aerospace-grade titanium market — a concrete, active commercial relationship, not a geological aspiration. This matters because aerospace titanium supply has been severely disrupted by the Russia sanctions regime: VSMPO-AVISMA, previously the dominant Western supplier accounting for roughly 30% of global aerospace titanium, became inaccessible to Western manufacturers after 2022. Boeing, Airbus, and their tier-one suppliers have been seeking alternative sources ever since. Kazakhstan’s existing market position fills part of that gap and has been doing so quietly while the policy debate concentrates on rare earths and lithium. Titanium is now on both the EU and US critical minerals lists. For investors and industrial offtake partners, the titanium story in Kazakhstan differs from the rare earth story in one crucial respect: the supply chain is already functioning. The opportunity is in expanding and securing existing capacity, not in building it from scratch.
3.4 Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan — Early-Stage, High-Risk, Potentially High-Reward
The CPC report and the C5+1 framework rightly include Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Kumtor Gold in Kyrgyzstan and Zarafshon Gold in Tajikistan are the flagship projects, but the rare earth and critical mineral potential in both countries is largely unexplored. Legal frameworks are weaker, infrastructure is thinner, and political risk is higher. But for investors and juniors willing to absorb early-stage risk, the geological endowment is compelling.
The legal reform chapter of the CPC report is a necessary reality check here. As Dr. Ruchan Kaya argues directly: No Reform, No Mining. Without clear subsoil use codes, transparent licensing, independent dispute resolution, and ESG frameworks compatible with Western capital markets, foreign investment will remain shallow. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have work to do.
3.5 Technology Transfer and Workforce Development
Central Asian governments are unanimous on one point: they do not want to be raw material exporters indefinitely. They want technology transfer, workforce development, and the creation of domestic industrial capacity. This creates a genuine market for mining engineering services, training, metallurgical technology, and environmental management expertise. European, Japanese, and South Korean companies with this expertise have an opening that pure extractive investors do not.
4. The Six-Party Chess Board: China, Russia, USA, EU, Türkiye, Japan/South Korea
China — The Incumbent with a Structural Advantage
China’s position in Central Asian critical minerals is not primarily about geology. It is about infrastructure, processing capacity, financing terms, and decades of relationship-building. The BRI has locked in logistical corridors, off-take agreements, and debt obligations that are difficult to unwind quickly. Chinese firms continue to invest at scale: Zijin Mining — now the world’s fourth-largest gold producer — has assembled a “Gold Triangle” across Kazakhstan (Raygorodok, $1.2 billion acquisition completed October 2025), Kyrgyzstan (Taldybulak Levoberezhny), and Tajikistan (Jilau and Taror mines, where it is the largest gold producer accounting for over 70% of national output). East Hope Group — one of China’s largest private industrial conglomerates and a top-ten global aluminium producer — is advancing a $12.6 billion fully integrated aluminium cluster in Kazakhstan: bauxite mining, a two million tonne per year alumina refinery, a one million tonne per year primary aluminium smelter, and a captive one-gigawatt power plant across the Kostanay and Aktobe regions. The framework agreement was signed with Astana in February 2025; geological exploration of eleven bauxite and coal deposits is already under way. If delivered, it would be one of the largest single foreign direct investment projects in Kazakhstan’s industrial history — and a textbook example of the integrated industrial model China deploys while Western investors are still circling at the MoU stage. China National Gold Group is advancing into Uzbekistan via government-level MoUs on exploration and technology transfer. Chinese cumulative investment in Central Asia reached $35.9 billion by mid-2025, a 1.5-fold increase since 2020, with Kazakhstan in the first half of 2025 alone attracting an estimated $23 billion in BRI-linked commitments — making it the single largest BRI capital recipient globally in that period. Any honest assessment must acknowledge that China will remain the dominant actor in Central Asian mineral supply chains throughout the 2020s.
The more important question is whether China’s dominance is vulnerable to a strategic discontinuity rather than gradual erosion. The CFR’s February 2026 report makes an argument that cuts against the grain of most current thinking: the United States cannot out-mine or out-process China, and attempting to do so is the wrong strategy. The correct approach is to leapfrog China’s dominance through innovation — scaling rare-earth-free magnets, mine tailings recovery, e-waste recycling, and AI-accelerated materials science. If this thesis is correct, the entire paradigm of building competing mine-to-magnet supply chains in Central Asia may be strategically secondary to the innovation race happening in US and allied laboratories. Central Asian governments and their Western partners should be alert to this possibility: the strategic premium on Central Asian deposits is real today, but it is not permanent if substitute materials technologies mature.
Russia — The Shadow Partner
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has paradoxically accelerated Central Asia’s strategic importance to the West while complicating its own position in the region. Central Asian governments are navigating with care — they cannot afford to antagonise Moscow, which retains significant economic and security leverage, but they are actively diversifying. Russia’s ability to invest in and benefit from Central Asian critical mineral development is constrained by sanctions, capital flight, and the rerouting of its own economy. For the near term, Russia’s role is more that of a constraint than a competitor in the Western engagement story.
United States — Urgency Without Sustained Patience
Washington’s engagement since 2025 has been substantive. Project Vault (a USD 12 billion public-private reserve initiative), FORGE (the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement), the Critical Minerals Ministerial with 54 countries, and the DFC’s Central Asia investment pipeline represent genuine institutional commitments. The C5+1 framework gives the US a multilateral architecture in the region.
However, it is important to understand what FORGE actually is — and what it is not. The Atlantic Council’s analysis makes a distinction that most coverage obscures: FORGE is structurally different from its predecessor, the Minerals Security Partnership. The MSP functioned primarily as a pooled investment co-ordination vehicle. FORGE is designed as a ‘membership by trade’ model — participation conditioned on adherence to shared market rules and price floors, rather than joint capital deployment. Investment remains bilateral. This means FORGE will not produce a multilateral investment fund for Kazakhstani or Uzbekistani mining projects. It will produce a shared pricing and trade architecture that in theory de-risks bilateral deals — but the capital mobilisation burden still falls on individual governments and DFIs acting separately. For Central Asian partners watching from Astana or Tashkent, this distinction matters enormously.
It is worth keeping the bilateral relationship in perspective: Kazakhstan has attracted more than $480 billion in cumulative foreign direct investment since independence, with gross FDI inflows reaching $20.5 billion in 2024 and investors from more than 120 countries currently active in the country. The US relationship is therefore being built onto an already diversified investment base, not into a vacuum. Kazakhstan signed USD 17 billion in new bilateral agreements with the US during President Tokayev’s November 2025 Washington visit, while Uzbekistan committed to investing up to USD 35 billion in the US over the next three years — directions of flow and deal structures that differ significantly, but which together signal that the C5+1 relationship has acquired genuine commercial weight. But commercial weight at the announcement stage and capital deployed in-country are different things.
The European Union — Engaged But Fragmented
The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act and the selection of 60 Strategic Projects — including Kazakhstan and Ukraine as external partner countries — represent a serious policy commitment. But the EUISS Chaillot Paper is damning on Europe’s pace of execution: American, Japanese, and particularly European diversification efforts are not on track to replace the volume or range of China-dominated production over the next decade.
The EU’s problem goes deeper than slow bureaucracy or fragmented financing instruments. As of late 2025, despite all the summits, roadmaps, and declared billions, only five EU companies have actually invested in CRM projects in Central Asia. That is not a financing gap problem — it is a near-total absence of private sector engagement. EU policy documents treat Central Asia as five countries of strategic importance; EU commercial reality has concentrated almost entirely on Kazakhstan, which is the only fully recognised EU external strategic partner with both the resource base and the legal framework for large-scale collaboration. Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and even Uzbekistan remain largely outside the EU’s actual investment footprint despite featuring prominently in its diplomatic declarations. Brussels risks building an elaborate architecture of frameworks and roadmaps that covers five countries on paper but delivers in one.
Türkiye — The Underappreciated Swing Player
Türkiye’s role in Central Asian critical minerals deserves far more analytical attention than it currently receives. Ankara’s position as a NATO member, a pragmatic economic partner to both Russia and China, and the institutional convener of the Organisation of Turkic States (OTS) gives it a combination of relationships that no other actor in this space possesses.
The OTS — which brings together Türkiye, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and observer states — is an increasingly active institutional vehicle for economic co-operation amongst Turkic-speaking nations. For critical minerals specifically, it creates a framework for Türkiye to position itself not merely as a transit corridor but as a co-investor and processing ally for Central Asian governments that want to move up the value chain.
The strategic picture that emerges from available data is striking in its specificity. Türkiye’s mineral engagement operates across four distinct partner-and-material vectors:
Partner
Key Materials / Vectors
Türkiye’s Function
Central Asia
Boron, refined REEs, battery recyclables
Co-investor and institutional processing ally via the Organisation of Turkic States (OTS)
China
Manganese, chromium, lithium, copper
Supply chain alternative and competitor in REE midstream processing
Russia & Iran
Light and heavy rare earth oxides
Corridor guardian; bypassing northern routes via the Middle Corridor
Logistics vectors
Transport infrastructure, regional border security
Gateway and facilitator for Eurasian mineral freight flows
Read together, these vectors tell a coherent story. Türkiye is positioning itself simultaneously as a co-investor with Central Asian partners in boron and REE processing (leveraging the OTS institutional framework), as a competitive alternative to China in REE midstream capacity, and as the indispensable corridor guardian for the Middle Corridor route that bypasses both Russia and Iran.
What is new and underreported is the domestic industrial ambition underpinning this positioning. At the OECD Critical Minerals Forum in Istanbul in April 2026, Türkiye’s Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar made a declaration that amounts to a strategic doctrine: “Having resources alone is no longer sufficient. You must be able to process them. Türkiye is building exactly that, combining extraction with deep processing capacity and high-tech industrial value creation.” The Beylikova REE project in Eskişehir province — described by Bayraktar as potentially one of the world’s largest deposits — already has a pilot facility operational, with plans for full industrial production including separation and processing of rare earth oxides for permanent magnets. A comprehensive Critical Raw Materials strategy is forthcoming from Ankara. This is not transit ambition. This is industrial policy.
The active Iran conflict and Hormuz disruption, which Bayraktar explicitly cited at the same forum, reinforces the Middle Corridor’s necessity. The corridor’s importance is no longer merely a response to the Ukraine war and the sanctioning of Russian routes — it is now being validated in real time by a second simultaneous crisis in maritime supply chains. Türkiye’s own boron endowment — approximately 73% of the world’s reserves — and the January 2026 mining sector MoU with Uzbekistan, which carries the weight of a presidential-level strategic council endorsement rather than a routine ministerial agreement, position Ankara as a co-architect of the post-Chinese supply chain rather than a passive transit facilitator.
The MINEX Asia Forum in Ankara on 24–25 June sits at exactly this intersection. Whether Türkiye chooses to deepen its processing and co-investment role, or remains primarily a corridor facilitator, will significantly shape the commercial geography of Central Asian mineral exports through 2030 and beyond.
Japan and South Korea — Quiet but Serious
Japan and South Korea have some of the most sophisticated critical mineral diversification programmes of any Western-aligned economies. Japan’s rare earth diversification after China’s 2010 export restriction was a decade-long institutional effort that produced real results. South Korea’s Korea Zinc committed USD 7.4 billion to new zinc refining in the US in 2025. Both countries are watching Central Asia closely and have existing relationships — South Korean companies are active in Kazakhstan’s energy and industrial sectors.
The EUISS paper notes that US and Japanese stockpiling and state-sponsored diversification efforts have been more successful than Europe’s — and that this risks disrupting the level playing field between downstream industries. Japan and South Korea’s engagement in Central Asia is likely to deepen significantly through 2030, and they may prove more reliable long-term partners than the US for the Central Asians, precisely because they have demonstrated institutional continuity in minerals diplomacy.
5. A 2030 Forecast: Honest Probabilities, Not Promotional Headlines
Based on the analysis above, the Forum’s assessment of where Central Asia is likely to stand in the global critical minerals picture by 2030 is as follows.
What Will Likely Have Happened
Kazakhstan will have advanced several significant critical mineral projects, particularly in uranium conversion and enrichment outside Russian supply chains, and in copper with one or two major Western-backed expansions. The Middle Corridor will carry materially higher volumes of goods, including mineral concentrates, with improved port and rail infrastructure — assuming the Georgia bottleneck is resolved, either through Tbilisi reversing course on Anaklia or through the TRIPP route becoming operational.
Uzbekistan will have attracted significant investment in gold and copper, building on its already-strong trajectory, and will have made progress on rare earth exploration, though commercial production at scale is unlikely before 2030.
Türkiye will have deepened its institutional role through the OTS and established at least one significant co-processing or co-investment arrangement with a Central Asian partner, most likely in boron derivatives or light rare earth oxides. The Beylikova project will have moved from pilot to initial industrial scale, giving Ankara credible processing capacity for the first time.
FORGE will have produced a shared pricing architecture and several concrete offtake agreements. However, because FORGE is a trade-rules framework rather than a pooled investment vehicle, the capital mobilisation it generates will be diffuse and bilateral rather than concentrated and strategic. The gap between FORGE’s institutional ambition and its actual investment footprint in Central Asia will remain a source of frustration.
Processing and refining capacity in Central Asia will have increased from its current low base, but will still represent a small fraction of what is needed to be genuinely China-independent. The midstream gap will have narrowed, not closed.
What Will Likely Not Have Happened
Central Asia will not have become a major supplier of processed rare earth materials to Western markets by 2030. The timeline from geological survey to commercial rare earth processing facility is typically fifteen to twenty years, and the clock has not been running long enough.
China’s dominance in processing will not have been broken. It may have been reduced at the margin — particularly for specific materials where Western-backed alternatives have been developed — but the structural advantage Beijing built over three decades cannot be unwound in five years.
A unified, coherent Western investment approach to Central Asia will not have materialised. The EU, US, Japan, South Korea, and Türkiye will continue to operate largely in parallel rather than in co-ordination, missing the synergies that a genuinely multilateral approach could generate.
The Wild Cards
Innovation as disruptor. The CFR’s February 2026 analysis argues that the US and its allies cannot out-mine or out-process China — and should not try. The alternative is to leapfrog China’s dominance through disruptive technologies: rare-earth-free magnets that eliminate the most geopolitically vulnerable inputs, mine tailings recovery that yields critical minerals from existing waste streams faster and more cheaply than new extraction, and e-waste recycling at industrial scale. If these technologies mature faster than expected, the strategic premium on Central Asian deposits could diminish even as geopolitical interest in the region remains high. For Central Asian governments, this is both a warning and an opportunity: the window in which their geological endowment commands maximum strategic attention may be narrower than current diplomatic momentum implies.
The China re-activation deadline. The October 2025 rare earth export controls suspended under the Xi–Trump deal are due to re-activate in November 2026 unless the deal is renewed. By the time of MINEX Eurasia in London on 30 November, this will be an immediate live issue. If Beijing re-activates, the urgency around alternative supply chains — including Central Asian ones — will intensify sharply. If it extends the suspension, the pressure on Western governments to maintain costly diversification programmes will ease, potentially slowing capital deployment.
Geopolitical escalation beyond Ukraine. The Hormuz blockade has already demonstrated that disruption can arrive simultaneously from multiple directions. Central Asia’s importance as both a resource base and a logistics corridor increases with every crisis in maritime routes. But escalation can also redirect capital and political attention away from the patient, long-horizon work of building supply chains.
Domestic political stability in Central Asia itself is not guaranteed. Kyrgyzstan in particular has experienced significant political turbulence. Investors will need to see sustained legal and regulatory reform to deploy long-term capital at scale.
Conclusion: The Window Is Open — But Not Indefinitely
Central Asia’s critical minerals moment is real. The geology is there. The geopolitical will is growing. The legal frameworks are improving in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The Middle Corridor is becoming a genuine alternative logistics route — though its Georgian gateway is more fragile than most analyses acknowledge. And for the first time in a generation, Central Asian governments are actively seeking to diversify away from exclusive dependence on Chinese and Russian capital and markets.
But the picture is more complicated than the wave of optimistic policy documents suggests. FORGE is a trade-rules architecture, not a capital deployment machine — and the distinction matters for Central Asia. The EU has five companies on the ground despite its ambitious declarations. China’s export control détente has a hard expiry date in November 2026. And the CFR’s innovation thesis raises a genuinely uncomfortable question: what if the West’s best path to supply chain security runs through the laboratory rather than the mine shaft?
Türkiye’s OTS-anchored positioning adds a genuinely new dimension to this picture. An Ankara that is actively building REE processing capacity at Beylikova, institutionalising economic co-operation through the OTS, and serving as the corridor’s most reliable western terminus is not a passive transit hub. It is a co-architect of the post-Chinese critical mineral supply chain — if it chooses to be.
The businesses and investors who will win in this space are not those signing MoUs at ministerial summits. They are those who are currently doing the detailed geological work, building the processing partnerships, securing the offtake agreements, and positioning in the Middle Corridor logistics chain. They are thinking in fifteen-year horizons, not fifteen-month ones.
At MINEX Asia in Ankara, MINEX Europe in Ireland, and MINEX Eurasia in London, the Forum is convening these conversations — not about what Central Asia might become, but about what concrete steps, in what sequence, with what capital and what institutions, will make the difference between another wave of declarations and a genuine reorientation of global critical mineral supply chains.
The rocks are there. The question is whether the will, the capital, and the institutions are there too — and whether they will arrive before the window closes.
Japan is preparing to dispatch a delegation to Greenland this summer to assess opportunities for rare earth extraction, as Tokyo intensifies efforts to diversify critical mineral supply chains away from Chinese dominance.
The visit will include officials from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry alongside representatives from Japanese trading companies and the Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security, according to Nikkei. The delegation will hold talks with local Greenlandic government officials.
The mission adds Japan to a growing list of countries actively courting Greenland’s mineral potential. The Arctic island, an autonomous territory of the Danish kingdom, has attracted heightened international attention since US President Donald Trump signalled interest in acquiring it in January, prompting alarm among NATO allies before discussions were moved to a diplomatic track. Greenland’s strategic location and potentially significant rare earth reserves have made it a focus for governments seeking alternatives to Chinese-controlled supply chains.
Japan’s interest is driven by structural necessity. The country is 100% dependent on mineral imports and has been accelerating its critical minerals diplomacy across Central Asia, Africa and the Pacific in parallel with the Greenland mission.
The Trump administration’s push to create a Western critical minerals trading bloc is facing significant headwinds from sceptical G7 allies and a divided mining industry, with negotiations over price supports, governance structures and enforcement mechanisms producing more disagreement than consensus ahead of the G7 leaders’ summit in France.
The bloc concept, first proposed by Vice President JD Vance in February, aims to help Western nations reduce dependence on China — which built its dominant position in cobalt, lithium, nickel, rare earths and other strategic minerals partly by operating at a loss and suppressing global prices, driving Western competitors out of business. The proposed measures include price supports, market standards, subsidies and guaranteed purchases, potentially enforced by adjustable tariffs to uphold pricing integrity.
A central sticking point is the US plan to use prices derived from the Pentagon’s DARPA-developed OPEN AI metals programme, designed to calculate what a mineral should cost when labour, processing and other inputs are factored in while alleged Chinese market manipulation is excluded. European allies have pushed back against this approach, with one source citing concerns about Washington having too much sway over EU pricing. “For Europe, it would be better to have a price index based on real deals in the European market,” said Nicola Beer, who oversees minerals financing at the European Investment Bank. As an alternative, EU-funded body EIT RawMaterials is working with digital platform Metalshub to create pricing indices outside Chinese government-led mechanisms that could include the US, Australia, Canada and the UK.
Governance is generating its own fractures. France, holding the G7 presidency, and Canada want a permanent administrative secretariat within the IEA or OECD to track initiatives as presidencies rotate. The US is reluctant. France and Canada also favour a multilateral trading bloc approach, while Washington wants to forge fast bilateral deals and expand them later. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Washington aims to present proposals for binding bilateral agreements to Japan and the EU before the end of June, potentially covering five to ten minerals including heavy rare earths, antimony, graphite and tungsten — all subject to Chinese export bans or restrictions.
European officials say they want to study the impact of price supports on medium and long-term dynamics rather than commit to fast deals. A broader concern is who ultimately pays the premium for higher-priced minerals and how far down the supply chain any subsidy should extend — questions complicated by the fact that many Western nations import very few minerals in raw or lightly processed form.
Within the US itself, more than 230 public submissions to Greer’s office reveal a divided mining industry. General Motors, Umicore, Sibanye Stillwater, MP Materials and the US Chamber of Commerce all offered divergent proposals. The National Mining Association advised against price-fixing, recommending tax credits and incentives instead. “While market interventions such as pricing mechanisms may play a role in certain circumstances, incentive-based approaches are better suited to addressing challenges facing the domestic mining industry,” said its CEO Rich Nolan.
“There’s nervousness from all sides about what to do and how different actions could affect different parts of the supply chain,” said Blake Harden of EY.
The Trump administration’s push to create a Western critical minerals trading bloc is facing significant headwinds from sceptical G7 allies and a divided mining industry, with negotiations over price supports, governance structures and enforcement mechanisms producing more disagreement than consensus ahead of the G7 leaders’ summit in France.
The bloc concept, first proposed by Vice President JD Vance in February, aims to help Western nations reduce dependence on China — which built its dominant position in cobalt, lithium, nickel, rare earths and other strategic minerals partly by operating at a loss and suppressing global prices, driving Western competitors out of business. The proposed measures include price supports, market standards, subsidies and guaranteed purchases, potentially enforced by adjustable tariffs to uphold pricing integrity.
A central sticking point is the US plan to use prices derived from the Pentagon’s DARPA-developed OPEN AI metals programme, designed to calculate what a mineral should cost when labour, processing and other inputs are factored in while alleged Chinese market manipulation is excluded. European allies have pushed back against this approach, with one source citing concerns about Washington having too much sway over EU pricing. “For Europe, it would be better to have a price index based on real deals in the European market,” said Nicola Beer, who oversees minerals financing at the European Investment Bank. As an alternative, EU-funded body EIT RawMaterials is working with digital platform Metalshub to create pricing indices outside Chinese government-led mechanisms that could include the US, Australia, Canada and the UK.
Governance is generating its own fractures. France, holding the G7 presidency, and Canada want a permanent administrative secretariat within the IEA or OECD to track initiatives as presidencies rotate. The US is reluctant. France and Canada also favour a multilateral trading bloc approach, while Washington wants to forge fast bilateral deals and expand them later. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Washington aims to present proposals for binding bilateral agreements to Japan and the EU before the end of June, potentially covering five to ten minerals including heavy rare earths, antimony, graphite and tungsten — all subject to Chinese export bans or restrictions.
European officials say they want to study the impact of price supports on medium and long-term dynamics rather than commit to fast deals. A broader concern is who ultimately pays the premium for higher-priced minerals and how far down the supply chain any subsidy should extend — questions complicated by the fact that many Western nations import very few minerals in raw or lightly processed form.
Within the US itself, more than 230 public submissions to Greer’s office reveal a divided mining industry. General Motors, Umicore, Sibanye Stillwater, MP Materials and the US Chamber of Commerce all offered divergent proposals. The National Mining Association advised against price-fixing, recommending tax credits and incentives instead. “While market interventions such as pricing mechanisms may play a role in certain circumstances, incentive-based approaches are better suited to addressing challenges facing the domestic mining industry,” said its CEO Rich Nolan.
“There’s nervousness from all sides about what to do and how different actions could affect different parts of the supply chain,” said Blake Harden of EY.
Kyrgyzstan’s Minister of Natural Resources, Ecology and Technical Supervision Akyl Toktobaev has met with a delegation from Turkish company MTA International Mining Inc., led by CEO Nail Yildirim, to discuss prospects for bilateral cooperation across the full mining value chain including geological exploration, mineral processing and critical minerals development.
The discussions focused on joint geological exploration, technology and knowledge sharing in exploration, production, beneficiation and mineral processing, personnel training, specialist internships and joint research projects in rare earth elements and critical minerals — areas of growing strategic priority as Western governments seek to diversify supply chains away from Chinese-dominated sources.
The meeting follows Toktobaev’s participation in April 2026 in the OECD Forum on Strategically Important Minerals in Istanbul, where he emphasised Kyrgyzstan’s ongoing implementation of international reporting standards and strengthened disclosure requirements in the subsoil use sector. “This contributes to increased transparency in the industry and strengthens investor and public confidence,” he said. On the sidelines of the Istanbul forum, Toktobaev also held a bilateral meeting with Turkish Energy and Natural Resources Minister Alparslan Bayraktar to discuss expanding subsoil use cooperation between the two countries.
Kyrgyzstan holds significant critical mineral endowment including approximately 13% of global antimony reserves and substantial gold, copper and rare metal resources, and has been working to position itself as an investable jurisdiction as Western and allied interest in Central Asian mineral assets intensifies. Turkey’s MTA International Mining is the international arm of the Turkish state geological survey, giving the cooperation discussions an institutional rather than purely commercial character.
The final outstanding proposal for opencast coal mining in the United Kingdom has been refused, after Carmarthenshire Council rejected plans by Bryn Bach Coal Ltd to extend the Glan Lash mine near Llandybie in south Wales, citing unacceptable impacts on protected woodland, peatland and an endangered butterfly population.
The council’s head of place and sustainability, Rhodri Griffiths, said the proposals conflicted with multiple policies on biodiversity and the environment. The scheme would have adversely affected protected woodland and hedgerows and caused what he described as “the unacceptable disturbance, degradation and loss” of irreplaceable peatland. The application also raised concerns for a local population of marsh fritillary — one of the UK’s most threatened butterfly species.
Bryn Bach Coal had sought to extend the site over 10.3 hectares, promising extraction of 85,000 tonnes of coal and 11 jobs. The company had revised its application after councillors rejected an earlier version in 2023, arguing it had developed a niche non-thermal market for premium anthracite with demand from water filtration, battery production and green steelmaking industries. It has six months to appeal the decision.
The rejection means there are now no live applications for new coal mines anywhere in the UK. Coal Action Network described the decision as reflecting “a clear, strategic commitment to climate leadership, rare habitat protection, and safeguarding the health of surrounding communities,” while Friends of the Earth Cymru called it “great news” that brought to a close years of campaigning and ended Wales’ last opencast coal mine.
The Glan Lash mine opened in 2012 under a licence permitting extraction of 92,500 tonnes of coal over four and a half years before closing in 2019. The UK’s largest opencast coalmine, Ffos-y-Fran above Merthyr Tydfil, closed in 2023 after its extension application was similarly refused. Wales retains one deep mine, at Aberpergwm in Neath Port Talbot.
The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which came into force in 2026, is creating new compliance challenges for Kazakh металлургical exporters supplying the European market.
CBAM is designed to account for carbon dioxide emissions generated during the production of imported goods and serves as an environmental standard for both European and foreign manufacturers. Kazakh exporters are now required to maintain detailed carbon reporting in order to preserve access to EU markets.
More than half of Kazakhstan’s aluminum exports are destined for the European Union. In addition to the aluminum sector, the new rules also apply to ferrous metallurgy products.
Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Trade and Integration, the International Trade Centre (ITC) and QazTrade conducted an assessment of CBAM’s impact on local businesses and prepared practical recommendations for metallurgical companies adapting to the new framework.
According to the study, exporters of raw aluminum, ferrochrome, steel bars and rods could face annual CBAM-related costs of around €114 million if export volumes remain at 2025 levels.
QazTrade Deputy Chairman Nurlan Kulbatyrov said Kazakh industrial exporters have already begun adapting to the new EU requirements. Support measures are being introduced to help companies reduce financial pressure and maintain the competitiveness of Kazakh products in the European market.
During a June 3 seminar, representatives of business, government and international organizations discussed methods for monitoring and verifying emissions, as well as opportunities linked to greener industrial production.
One of the report’s authors, ITC expert Joost Pauwelyn, noted that Kazakhstan exports more than €600 million worth of steel and aluminum products to the EU annually. He warned that European greenhouse gas regulations could increase annual costs for Kazakh exporters by more than €100 million. Approximately 90% of the additional burden is expected to fall on steel bars and rods. In some cases, CBAM-related expenses could exceed the value of the exported product itself.
Pauwelyn outlined several measures that could significantly reduce the financial impact on producers, including:
Monitoring and declaring actual emissions rather than relying on default values
Accrediting Kazakh verification bodies
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions at production facilities
Developing domestic carbon pricing mechanisms in Kazakhstan
American startup Atana Elements is targeting lithium exploration beneath industrial areas in Germany and Poland where Volkswagen and BMW operate manufacturing facilities, in a project backed by Chilean mining major Antofagasta that aims to reduce Europe’s dependence on Chinese critical mineral imports.
The company has secured exploration licences covering approximately 1.5 million acres across regions around Salzgitter in Germany and Wrocław in Poland, according to the Financial Times. The fact that the exploration areas lie beneath facilities already consuming lithium in battery production is described as coincidental rather than by design.
Atana Elements is combining historical geological data with artificial intelligence technologies to identify promising lithium deposits, working in cooperation with Antofagasta. The company estimates it could extract up to 26 million tonnes of lithium across the two sites over the next 20 years — a figure that, if realised, would represent a significant addition to European domestic critical mineral supply. However, analysts cited by the Financial Times cautioned that the project remains at an early stage and that any assessment of actual production volumes is premature.
The initiative reflects growing interest in unconventional domestic lithium sources across Europe as governments and industries seek to reduce exposure to Chinese-dominated supply chains for battery materials essential to the electric vehicle transition.
