ANALYSIS: Uzbekistan is quietly building a critical-minerals hand
ANALYSIS: Uzbekistan is quietly building a critical-minerals hand
Two announcements a fortnight apart tell the same story about Uzbekistan. In Samarkand in October, Tashkent unveiled 54 agreements with American partners worth about $12 billion, covering critical minerals, energy, transport and digital technology. This week, Russia's Rosatom said its scientists had worked out how to extract lithium from Uzbekistan's Nurlikon deposit, recovering more than 94% of the metal with no waste.
The pattern is deliberate. Uzbekistan sits on minerals the world now wants, lithium for batteries, uranium, rare earths, and it is selling access to everyone at once: Washington, Moscow and Beijing, without picking a side. The US deals came with a C5+1 ministerial and Uzbekistan signing the Artemis Accords, the American framework for space exploration. The Rosatom technology comes with a nuclear power plant already under construction in the country.
What changed: Uzbekistan used to export raw cotton and gas. Now it is trying to move up the chain, processing the minerals at home and keeping the value. The lithium plan would produce 8,500 tonnes of high-purity lithium carbonate a year from ore that holds only 0.5% lithium oxide, which is exactly the kind of low-grade deposit that only becomes valuable when the processing technology works.
The constraints are real. The $12 billion is agreements and prospective projects, not money in the bank, and the Uzbek ministry itself did not say how much is financed. The lithium technology still needs pilot industrial tests next year before it scales. And balancing Washington, Moscow and Beijing is a skill that gets harder as great-power competition sharpens.
What to watch: whether the Samarkand agreements turn into signed contracts and construction, starting with the minerals and rail projects; whether the Nurlikon pilot tests in 2027 hit their recovery targets; and whether Tashkent can keep all three big partners happy while the war in Ukraine and US-China rivalry pull Central Asia in opposite directions.
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