What does Kazakhstan produce and export?

The Kazakh shield carries ore bodies that have been worked for a very long time. Copper at Zhezkazgan, held in sandstone beds rather than in the porphyries that supply most of the world, was mined in the Bronze Age and industrialized under Soviet planning, with smelters and refineries built beside the mines and whole cities built beside those. Newer open pits at Aktogay and Bozshakol in the east are conventional porphyry deposits developed since 2015. Kazakhstan mined 3.1% of the world's copper in 2025 (USGS) and held 3.0% of world copper export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI), most of it refined cathode sent to China and Europe. Gold, much of it a byproduct of the same base-metal operations plus dedicated mines in the north and east, reached 3.9% of world production in 2025 (USGS). Zinc, lead and coal come out of the same industrial belt.

Oil is the larger business and the harder logistics problem. The supergiant Tengiz field, found in 1979 near the northeastern shore of the Caspian, and Kashagan, in the shallow, freezing, sour-gas-bearing waters offshore, hold very large volumes of crude oil that has no coastline of its own to leave from. The overwhelming share of exports travels north on the Caspian Pipeline Consortium line to Novorossiysk on the Russian Black Sea coast, which makes Kazakh output hostage to a single route; alternatives across the Caspian by tanker to Baku, and east to China by pipeline, carry a fraction of the volume.

Farming is a story of one campaign. The Virgin Lands program from 1954 ploughed tens of millions of hectares of northern steppe for wheat, on soils that are fertile but dry, with yields that swing with a short, unreliable rainy season. The grain still moves out by rail through Russia or south into Central Asia. Irrigated cotton in the far south, along the Syr Darya on canals that helped drain the Aral Sea, gave 1.3% of world cotton production in 2023 (FAOSTAT).