Central Asia as New Battle Grounds: Critical Mineral Strategies of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

This paper examines how the energy transition may reproduce a “green resource curse” and how Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan attempt to escape it. While debates emphasize upstream ESG compliance or downstream clean-tech deployment, this paper argues the decisive arena is the midstream—smelting, refining, and separation—where value addition, quality, and supply security are set. Because midstream capacity is more concentrated than mining, mineral flows converge on bottlenecks, heightening geopolitical vulnerability and leaving resource-rich states to bear extraction costs while exporting low-value ores. Building on resource-curse political economy, the paper conceptualizes the green resource curse as a midstream capability gap that drives trade deficits, weak diversification, and new dependency under decarbonization. It then compares Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan’s strategies to climb the value chain through beneficiation, state-led coordination, and external partnerships. Kazakhstan’s rare earth push highlights the technical difficulty of high-purity separation, the temptation of rapid Chinese capital-technology integration, and market-access risks as U.S./EU rules of origin and sustainability standards tighten. Uzbekistan’s approach centers on institutional consolidation (UzTMK), a large investment pipeline, cleaner processing initiatives, and attempts to create domestic demand through EV and battery projects. The paper identifies four conditions for avoiding a green resource curse: (1) internalizing midstream know-how, (2) reducing processing carbon intensity to meet emerging trade regimes, (3) diversifying partners to preserve flexibility, and (4) long-term institutional learning and workforce development. It concludes that Central Asia’s outcomes will depend less on resource abundance than on converting strategy into midstream sovereignty.