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Unnecessary market worries
The fears of the world commodity markets about instability in Kazakhstan were in vain. Even the potential change of power did not threaten the mining enterprises in any way – most of them are owned by foreign investors and are located far from the capitals, there was no reason to expect that any scenario in Almaty or Nursultan would somehow destabilize the oil or uranium mining enterprises.
Kazakhstan produces 2% of world oil – this is a significant amount, but there must be very serious interruptions in the supply of Kazakh raw materials for the market to notice this. In the world uranium production, the share of Kazakhstan is much higher – more than 40%, but, on the other hand, the share of nuclear energy in the global balance of primary energy resources is only slightly more than 4% (against more than 30% for oil and 25-27% for gas and coal), and the peculiarities of the fuel cycle are such that even interruptions in the current uranium production do not greatly affect the operational parameters of the NPP here and now.
That is, the panic in the markets was very premature. And even in the case of a hypothetical regime change in Kazakhstan, the new authorities would definitely not be interested in losing their export revenues from raw materials – destabilization could happen as a result of, say, a protracted civil war along the lines of Libya or Syria, which was an almost improbable scenario.
Why gas prices have risen
An important issue is the factor in the increase in prices for domestic liquefied gas, which became the direct cause of the protests (which, however, quickly turned into political demands). It must be said that protests against rising energy prices, turning into a catalyst for the collapse of authoritarian regimes, are not a new phenomenon, for example, the Suharto regime in Indonesia collapsed in 1998. However, in Kazakhstan, we are likely to see the beginning of a process of mass unrest caused by dissatisfaction with the Nazarbayev-Tokayev dictatorship, and not the endgame, as in Indonesia in the late 1990s.
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