Website: Asia.com

Sabri Karahan — General Manager, DAMA Engineering

Karahan delivers a historical account of how Turkish mining engineering developed from essentially nothing into a mature, exportable discipline. He starts with the Ottoman era (copper smelting using wind and water power in the Elazığ/Diyarbakır region) and traces the founding of MTA, Turkey’s exploration institute, established under Etibank in the 1930s, which drove early state-led mineral discoveries. He describes this as “high technology” for its time despite its primitive appearance by modern standards.

The turning point, he argues, was the 2000 reform of Turkey’s mining law, which put international and domestic companies on equal legal footing — the same rights to staking, licensing, and fees. This single change shifted exploration from an MTA-only activity into a genuinely international one, and coincided with Turkey’s adoption of modern industry standards: chain-of-custody practices, JORC and NI 43-101 reporting codes (and later a Turkish national code), and stronger environmental, health, and safety frameworks. He’s candid about the earlier baseline — recalling that in the early 1970s, tailings were dumped directly into the Tigris River, a practice unthinkable today.

He identifies the Bergama gold mine (2001) as a milestone — Turkey’s first cyanide heap-leach hydrometallurgical project and the origin of a still-controversial public narrative around cyanide, foreign companies, and gold mining, despite gold prices sitting near $250/oz at the time. From there, Turkish engineering firms built a working model: handle everything possible domestically, and bring in international partners specifically for identified gaps — first as co-designers, later purely as construction consultants, reflecting growing domestic capability.

Today, he notes, Turkey operates around 18 active gold projects, most engineered predominantly by Turkish firms using largely Turkish-made equipment and materials, and Turkish engineering companies are now active in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Bulgaria. He points to slope-stability monitoring and safety-conscious practices (due diligence, HAZOP studies, site rehabilitation) as further signs of maturity. Looking ahead, he describes Turkish process-engineering firms actively diversifying into critical minerals — citing early joint ventures targeting electrolytic magnesium and nickel — and closes by offering to share Turkish technology and best practices through partnerships across Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, and Africa.

Simon Glancy — Managing Partner, Strategic Solutions

Simon Glancy frames CRM not simply as a mine-to-market logistics problem but as an enabler of broad industrial transformation, warning against repeating the mistake of the 1990s oil and gas boom, where value-added processing happened abroad rather than regionally. He argues private investment remains scarce, so states must lead — underwriting risk while capturing a fair share of returns — and proposes a regional CRM ecosystem rather than each Central Asian state acting alone.

He presents Uzbekistan as the most transparent data source: state copper concern AGMK is forecast to hit $1 billion in exports by 2030 (40% of Uzbekistan’s metal exports), while tungsten exports are forecast around $80 million. Deal activity is concentrated almost entirely in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, dominated by sovereign rather than private financing — he highlights the $1.4 billion Cove Capital/Kazakhstan/Sinohydro tungsten deal, backed by $1.1 billion in US state financing, as an outlier with no regional comparison. Citing BCG’s Andrea Nawrocki, he flags recurring execution problems: unrealistic timelines, overly complex decision-making, and weak feasibility-study preparation that discourages investors.

He proposes regional hub clustering — Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as processing hubs, with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan supplying semi-processed inputs in the near term (2026–2030) and hosting satellite processing by 2030–2040. He closes by outlining four opportunity areas for Turkish involvement: mining investment/project-readiness expertise, integrated industrial solutions (technology transfer, logistics, recycling, renewable energy), building a regional knowledge/R&D economy, and helping architect a regional CRM ecosystem.

Claire Alidenes — Principal Investment Specialist, Asian Development Bank (ADB)

Alidenes brings a mining-industry background (most recently at the Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold joint venture in Mongolia, between Rio Tinto and the Mongolian government) to her role building ADB’s critical-minerals-to-manufacturing portfolio. She frames ADB’s approach as holistic across two dimensions: the full value chain (extraction through processing, manufacturing, and recycling) and the full stakeholder set (governments and private sector together).

On infrastructure, she stresses that supporting rail, ports, and energy systems matters alongside mineral development itself, and echoes the morning panel’s emphasis on regional cooperation and supply-chain diversification. On governance, ADB works with governments on regulatory policy, institutional capacity, and geological data, while applying rigorous ESG standards — she notes candidly that ADB avoided mining for decades following past environmental and social harms, but now recognizes minerals extraction is necessary to achieve energy-transition goals.

She cites a widely referenced $270 billion investment gap required to meet net-zero goals in this sector, but pushes back on the idea that money itself is the primary blocker. Echoing a theme raised earlier in the day, she argues the real bottleneck is the shortage of well-prepared, bankable projects — ones that can clearly demonstrate risks and how they’re being mitigated, building the confidence institutions need to finance them.

She introduces a new ADB financing facility, announced at the bank’s annual meeting in May and not yet deployed, with two components: $1–3 billion in financing (largely co-financed with Korean export-import and insurance institutions) and a smaller grant window specifically designed to help projects reach “bankability” — the point where they can credibly demonstrate investment quality. As an example of ADB’s work in the Tethyan belt, she points to the Reko Diq copper-gold project in Balochistan, Pakistan — a roughly $7–8 billion investment involving multiple institutions, currently slowed by regional security issues. She highlights that ADB’s role there included guaranteeing equity investment from a government entity, illustrating that multilateral banks add value not just through direct lending but by building the confidence needed to attract other investors.

McFersonen, an international disputes lawyer, opens by joking he has no checkbook to offer — only advice on how capital, once deployed, can be protected. His core argument: mining sits at the intersection of two tensions — strong long-term demand growth (driven by electrification, renewables, and energy storage) and increasingly assertive government policy shifts that can imperil long-life, capital-intensive projects. He describes a global rise in protectionist policy and resource nationalism, including license cancellations and other state conduct that interferes with mining investments, and stresses that political risk has become a genuine boardroom factor.

His central message is aimed squarely at companies who assume strong government relationships make legal protection unnecessary. He argues this instinct, while understandable, can be an expensive mistake — relationships can falter with elections, leadership changes, or shifting political priorities, none of which the investor controls. His solution is investment treaties: agreements between states that protect investors from one treaty country operating in another, covering obligations like fair and equitable treatment, protection from unlawful expropriation, and non-discriminatory treatment relative to domestic or third-country investors. Breaches can include license revocations, retroactive taxation, unexplained permit delays, or project shutdowns based on unfounded environmental claims.

Crucially, he explains that this protection isn’t a contract with the host state — it’s structural. An investor needs an entity incorporated in a treaty-partner state somewhere in its ownership chain (not necessarily at the top, and indirect holdings are generally permitted). He cautions that treaties, despite appearing similar, differ meaningfully in scope and coverage, making experienced legal counsel essential when structuring investments — and notes that restructuring to gain treaty protection is generally permissible as long as no dispute is already foreseeable.

He highlights that mining now represents a growing share of investment treaty disputes, particularly at the exploration and development stage, when capital has been committed but cash flow remains distant — citing his own current work on a gold mine dispute in India. On accessibility, he notes many disputes are supported by third-party litigation funders who cover legal costs on a non-recourse basis in exchange for a share of any award, meaning a strong claim needn’t strain a company’s balance sheet. He closes by framing investment treaties as protection against a risk investors “cannot price and cannot control” — the conduct of the host government — and urges companies to seek advice before problems arise, not after.