China is focused on ‘new oil’ from Kazakhstan

ASTANA, Kazakhstan – Kenges Rakishev, one of the richest men in Kazakhstan, stepped off a private jet at a Soviet-era airport and hopped into the lead car of a convoy of sport utility vehicles. The cars tore down a two-lane road, zipping past the snow-covered steppe in eastern Kazakhstan at 90 mph.

Riding shotgun, Rakishev gestured toward the vast emptiness.

“Nothing, right?” he said with a chuckle. “But it’s a unique opportunity.”

That opportunity is in nickel, a key mineral used in electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies. Kazakhstan, a mineral-rich country in Central Asia, has a lot of nickel, and Rakishev is investing tens of millions of dollars to extract it.

Rakishev, 44, is always chasing the next big investment. In February, he was the driving force behind the public offering of a Canadian maker of plant-based instant noodles on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Before that, it was blockchain technology. And before that, it was an Israeli photo-sharing app, called Mobli, that tried to become the next Instagram.

He has connections to Kazakhstan’s ruling elite that are apparent in his energy investments and his purchase of a bank seized by the government. His close ties with a former prime minister of Kazakhstan brought him into the orbit of Hunter Biden, the American president’s son whose business dealings became the focus of an impeachment inquiry by House Republicans.

But Rakishev’s next big investment is much closer to home.

The world’s transition to renewable energy, including electric cars, requires huge amounts of nickel, copper, lithium and other so-called critical minerals. Kazakhstan has many of them, and China, the biggest producer of electric vehicles and batteries, is right next door and eager to buy.

“Everything is going to China,” Rakishev said.

A former Soviet Republic, Kazakhstan borders Russia to the north and China to the east and retains close trade ties to Russia. But China is a much larger customer for Kazakhstan’s critical minerals, using them to feed the insatiable needs of its factories churning out electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels. Kazakhstan said that it was also courting buyers from the West and that it did not play favorites when it came to investors in mining.

“If somebody is doing geological exploration, I don’t care what flag they carry,” said Kanat Sharlapayev, Kazakhstan’s minister of industry and construction and a former Citigroup executive in Kazakhstan and the Middle East.

Sharlapayev spoke from his office in Astana, the capital city, in a massive building known as the “House of Ministries.” He had just returned from Canada, where he had attended an international mining conference.

In recent years, Kazakhstan has signed pacts with the European Union and Britain to cooperate on critical minerals. The United States held initial discussions with Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries this year. On his trip, Sharlapayev stopped in Washington to meet with officials at a U.S. foreign development agency.

Kazakhstan is a longtime oil exporter, and Sharlapayev said years of working closely with American oil companies was proof that Astana was open to Western investment.

But after a short pause, he added, “Geography cannot be ignored, of course.”

China’s Europe link

It’s not just critical minerals that China wants from Kazakhstan. Beijing has invested billions of dollars, much of it as part of its Belt and Road foreign policy initiative, into upgrading Kazakhstan’s railways and other infrastructure to establish easier trade routes to Europe, an essential trading partner of China.

China’s economic influence is now apparent across the country. In Almaty, Kazakhstan’s wealthiest city, new car dealerships for Chinese electric vehicle brands are popping up.

On the Chinese-Kazakh border, the two countries built the Khorgos Gateway, the world’s biggest port used exclusively for handling cargo containers carried by trains. On Kazakhstan’s western border along the Caspian Sea, China invested in a container hub in the port city of Aktau.

This is now a railway alternative for sending goods from China to Europe in half the time it takes for sea cargo to travel from Shanghai to Rotterdam, Netherlands.

During a visit to Kazakhstan this month, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, said the two countries had agreed to double their bilateral trade “as soon as possible” by cultivating growth and cooperation in areas such as important minerals.

“We are a natural, organic partner to China,” said Nurlan Zhakupov, the CEO of Samruk-Kazyna JSC, Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund. “We are very safe economically and politically.”

For all the economic ties and expressions of friendship, there is a well of anti-Chinese sentiment and mistrust among some Kazakhs – especially among those outside the political class or the business elite.

China’s detention of Uyghurs and members of other largely Muslim groups, including ethnic Kazakhs, in camps in Xinjiang has added to the misgivings. Roughly two-thirds of Kazakhstan’s population is Muslim.

‘The new oil’

In three decades as an independent country after the fall of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has built an economy that is reliant on its natural resources. Through its state-owned mining firms, Kazakhstan is a leading supplier not only of oil and uranium but also of chromium, gold and copper.

For years, global miners stayed away from investing because it seemed risky. Kazakhstan was viewed as promising, but bogged down by bureaucracy, a lack of transparency and corruption. And eventually, new mining opportunities dried up.

Kazakhstan recognized it had a problem and rewrote its mining rules in 2018, using the investment-friendly regulations of Australia, a mining juggernaut, as a model.

Still, foreign investors did not come pouring in.

First, COVID-19 struck. Then violent protests erupted in Kazakhstan, pitting loyalists of the longtime ruler, Nursultan Nazarbayev, against the government of the current president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. The unrest was quelled with the help of Russian forces. Tokayev became the country’s undisputed leader and pledged to increase business privatization, combat corruption, and limit the role of monopolies and oligopolies.

In a national address last year, Tokayev said he wanted to prioritize the development of rare and rare-earth metals, which he called the “new oil.”

One of the prospectors lured to the country was Alex Walker, a 40-year-old Australian entrepreneur who relocated to Kazakhstan after a mining project of his in Sweden had failed. Looking for a new place to explore for valuable minerals, he ruled out Canada and Australia, which were already heavily mined. Africa was too complex to operate in. But Kazakhstan had potential.

“It looked like a place where you could really get things done,” he said.

Walker secured exploration licenses in partnership with Tau-ken Samruk JSC, the country’s national mining company, and moved his family to Kazakhstan in 2021. But in January 2022, days before he was preparing to list his company on the London Stock Exchange, the protests, now known as “Bloody January,” broke out. More than 200 people died, and thousands were arrested.

“The timing was horrible,” Walker said. “We were trying to present this as a very safe jurisdiction.”

Despite the upheaval, no investors bailed on the stock offering. Walker said his decision to search for critical minerals in Kazakhstan had proved to be the right move.

BHP Group, the world’s largest mining company, selected his company’s copper exploration project for a grant among hundreds of applicants.

Western interest in mining Kazakhstan is picking up momentum like a “snowball rolling down a hill,” said Kaisar Kozhamuratov, a partner at Aurora Minerals Group, a mining advisory company in Astana.

So far this year, the number of exploration licenses in Kazakhstan is on a pace to nearly double the average annual amount issued over the previous six years.

‘A pure businessman’

Rakishev is not backed by a multinational mining giant, but he casts a long shadow in the country.

His company, the Fincraft Group, has holdings in oil and gas operations and a handful of technology startups. It recently sold its stake in a bank that Rakishev had bought from the state a decade earlier. Rakishev also owns a private school and a cosmetics company that he started with his wife, Aselle Tasmagambetova, an ecologist, a philanthropist and the daughter of Imangali Tasmagambetov, a former prime minister.

Rakishev seems to know every prominent Kazakh in the country. He and his wife started a charity program with Vyacheslav Kim, Kazakhstan’s richest person, doling out grants to entrepreneurs. Former middleweight boxing world champion Gennadiy Golovkin, a national hero better known as GGG, is a friend and texting buddy. Zhakupov, the CEO of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, is a former classmate.

But these close relationships can create complications. In 2015, Rakishev accompanied Karim Massimov, Kazakhstan’s prime minister at the time, on a visit to the United States. During that trip, the two men attended a group dinner at an Italian restaurant in Washington with Joe Biden, then the vice president, and his son Hunter.

That dinner – and a business relationship with a company affiliated with Hunter Biden – put Rakishev on the radar of the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.

The investigation found that Rakishev had wired $142,300 to Rosemont Seneca Bohai, a company affiliated with the president’s son, in April 2014. The money was transferred to a car dealership to buy a vehicle for Hunter Biden, according to testimony by Devon Archer, Biden’s former business partner.

In closed-door testimony with a House oversight committee, Archer said Rakishev was “a prominent businessman” from a “prominent family,” according to a transcript.

In an interview, Rakishev said that he had met Archer in Kazakhstan and that they had become friends. He was planning to do business with Archer’s firm, Rosemont Seneca, in mining and real estate. He said he had bought a car for the new venture’s U.S. office. It was not supposed to be for Hunter Biden, whom he said he had met on several occasions. His understanding was that he, too, would drive the car when he visited.

“I don’t have any business relationship with Hunter. I didn’t ask him for any favors,” Rakishev said. He said he had attended the dinner with the elder Biden as part of Kazakhstan’s “official delegation,” but had not spoken with him. A representative for Hunter Biden did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite his political connections and his wealth – an estimated $435 million, according to Forbes – Rakishev said it was incorrect to call him an oligarch. In his mind, an oligarch is a businessperson with the power to change the government.

“I am a pure businessman,” he said.

Rakishev’s company, Kaznickel, is producing nickel and cobalt in the Abay region of eastern Kazakhstan. The project resembles a modest farming outpost, nothing like the open-pit sites used to extract nickel in countries such as Indonesia. In fields blanketed with fresh snow, boreholes stick out of the ground every few feet. Kaznickel injects a chemical solution into the ground through the openings. The nickel dissolves in the solution, which is then pumped to the surface and processed in a metal storehouse next to the site.

Kazakhstan has used a similar approach for decades to mine almost half of the world’s uranium. Its use for nickel is more novel.

The Kaznickel project was started five years ago as a pilot. Mining requires a lot of patience and foresight – a lesson that, Rakishev said, other countries would be wise to heed.

The West, he said, is lagging behind when it comes to critical minerals. China started to secure supplies of lithium, cobalt and graphite decades ago.

“You need to have patience like China,” he said. “They think strategically.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.