“Perhaps in the near future, because of the growth of domestic consumption, all the gas produced in Uzbekistan will be directed to ensuring stable GDP growth.” Behzot Narmatov, then chairman of Uztransgaz, said that to reporters on 27 June 2022. Exports, about a tenth of output at the time and sold to China, could end by 2025 or 2026. The gas would stay home.
The number that met that promise is 18.3. Uzbekistan produced 18.3 billion cubic metres in the first half of 2026, 16% less than a year earlier. The gas did stay home. There was not enough of it, and the country that was going to stop exporting now imports: just over 10 billion cubic metres this year, on the IEA's forecast.
Hold that figure against one more sentence. In October 2024 the energy minister of the day, Jurabek Mirzamahmudov, told a podcast that imports would reach 10 to 11 billion cubic metres by 2030. On the IEA's forecast they reach it in 2026. The president dismissed him in July.
The first official explanation is demand: the economy and the population grow, the minister said, so consumption grows. Put it against the arithmetic. In 2023 the national strategy promised 62 billion cubic metres of output by 2030. On 16 February this year the president approved a new version that promises 48.5, Spot reported. The retreat is 13.5 billion cubic metres. That exceeds the whole import. This year's target is 40.2 billion; double the first half, crudely, and you get 36.6. The hole is on the supply side, and it was written into the strategy before it showed up in the customs data.
Astana's explanation is technical. Kazakhstan's vice minister of energy, Kaiyrkhan Tutkyshbayev, said in Tyumen on 16 September that “this year we had small technical failures at our large fields”, and gave the volumes bought from Gazprom: about 4 billion cubic metres last year, 11 billion this year. If the failures are small and temporary, next year's number goes back toward 4. It does not. For 2027, he said, about 9 is under discussion.
The delivery slips, the target is rewritten or the date is moved, and the difference arrives by pipe from the north.
Processing plants are the third explanation: they will close the gap. The government's gas plan of July 2022 promised 15 billion cubic metres more commodity gas by 2030 and gas for 65% of the country by the same year. The first plant in that promise, 1 billion cubic metres a year at Kashagan, was due in 2024 on the energy ministry's plan. In February 2023 the government said 2025. In February 2026 Tutkyshbayev said the end of 2026. Inbusiness, reporting his Tyumen remarks, gives 2027. Four dates. Against a plant of 1 billion cubic metres a year, this year's rise in imports alone is 7 billion.
The mechanism has a plain name: target drift paid for with imports. The delivery slips, the target is rewritten or the date is moved, and the difference arrives by pipe from the north. Its price is unpublished. Each step is announced as a technical adjustment. Together they change the supplier.
You can see who pays on a bill. Since 1 June a household in Uzbekistan pays 1,100 soums for a cubic metre of gas inside the winter norm of 500 cubic metres, up from 1,000, and 2,000 soums in the next band, up from 1,800. The government's order cites the need to modernise the energy system as consumption rises. The budget pays a second time, through whatever QazaqGaz and Uzbekneftegaz owe Gazprom each month, in roubles in the Kazakh case, at prices neither company has published.
Since Friday a third payer is in view. The act President Trump signed on 18 September tells his trade representative to rank the buyers of Russian gas by volume and allows duties of up to 100% on the goods of the top 5. CAW's analysis of 18 September showed how close both countries sit to that line. The law does not ask why a country buys. It asks how much. It also asks whether the buyer has taken “significant steps” to buy less, a phrase it leaves undefined.
I am as wary of that blank as of any ministry's forecast. A test with no definition is a lever. The people it would be pulled on are Kazakh exporters who sell about $95 million of goods a month to the United States, Uzbek ones who sell about $7 million, and any bank that clears a significant payment to Gazprombank.
Three documents would settle what this costs and who carries it. The trade representative's methodology is due in Congress at least 10 days before any duty, so by 8 October if the duties come on the last permitted day. Gazprom's deliveries by country for the 12 months to 18 September would fix the ranking. The names of the banks through which QazaqGaz and Uzbekneftegaz pay would show who stands under the sanctions clause. None of the 3 has been published.
Aigerim Bekova writes on the political economy of Central Asia for Central Asia Wire. The views expressed are her own.