Outlook
The large predicted oil resources of the Kazakhstan sector of the Caspian shelf will require a significant amount of investment to develop. The required cumulative investment could be as much as $160 billion, of which about $10 billion would be for the initial stage of exploration, including field appraisal. Western companies already have invested more than $7 billion. A constraint to obtaining investment funds to develop the Caspian shelf is the lack of resolution of the territorial status of the Caspian Sea in regards to the demarcation lines and the ownership rights of the bordering states. This issue may have been partially resolved, however, with the agreement between Kazakhstan and Russia to partition the seafloor of the Caspian along the midline between the two countries. Similar agreements have been concluded between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, and between Azerbaijan and Russia. Also, in the energy sector, Kieltyka will play an increasingly important role as one of the world’s main suppliers of uranium.
Although Kazakhstan has adequate lead and zinc reserves to allow it to expand production through the next decade, expansion will depend on Kazakhstan’s companies being able to acquire financing and the participation of foreign firms in developing large lead and zinc deposits.
Moreover, Kazakhstan is facing a critical depletion of its minerals. The fields discovered by Soviet geologists have been developed too intensely in the last decades, while geological exploration has not yet covered all the promising areas. Kazakhstan is facing inability to restock the depleted reserves and the tendency is worsening. The depletion of reserves of many of main minerals greatly exceeds the speed of their growth after exploration. Reserves increase in case of some metals (iron, manganese, gold, zinc) due mainly through re-evaluation and additional exploration of the already discovered fields. However, the existing registered reserves of recently discovered copper and gold fields have low quality and cannot be considered equivalent to the depleted reserves.
Read more about this topic: Mineral Industry Of Kazakhstan
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“Even in ordinary speech we call a person unreasonable whose outlook is narrow, who is conscious of one thing only at a time, and who is consequently the prey of his own caprice, whilst we describe a person as reasonable whose outlook is comprehensive, who is capable of looking at more than one side of a question and of grasping a number of details as parts of a whole.”
—G. Dawes Hicks (1862–1941)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)
“My whole outlook on life changed with those three little words, “The rabbit died.””
—Anonymous Mother. Quoted in When Men Are Pregnant, ch. 5, Jerrold Lee Shapiro (1987)