Yerlan Akkenzhenov gave both numbers at a government press conference. “With the January attacks and continued attacks in June-July we lost approximately 3.5 million tonnes,” he said, and the adjusted plan “currently stands at 96 million tonnes.”
Two things sit under that arithmetic, one holding it up and one pulling it down. TengizChevroil's shareholders pushed capital repairs into next year, which keeps output running that was scheduled to pause. Karachaganak runs the other way: repairs there start in mid-September and the minister expects them to cost a further 400,000 to 450,000 tonnes.
This is national production, and it does not belong in the same sentence as pipeline throughput.
A second route is closing. Asked about the Druzhba branch toward Germany, Akkenzhenov said the three-month plans coming from Transneft show nothing at all. “As of now, in our three-month plans from Transneft, the figure is zero,” he said, “so resumption along the Druzhba branch is not foreseen in the coming three months.”
Read the 96 million for what it is. This is national production, and it does not belong in the same sentence as pipeline throughput. KazMunayGas moved 33.35 million tonnes through the CPC in the first half against a 72 million tonne forecast for the year that its head Askhat Khassenov restated on 7 August, when he also said the system has no alternative today on economics or on volume. That forecast is a transport question and it is still open.
The same morning, the cabinet approved a macroeconomic forecast for 2027 to 2029 that carries exports from $82.8 billion to $88.5 billion. The government's published readout of that session gives no oil production figure at all, so the export line and the production figure never meet in the published record.
Astana now has a quantity. No official Kazakh figure in money for what the war has cost the oil sector has surfaced in the wires, and 3.5 million tonnes is the first official number of any kind. The number to watch is the 72 million tonne CPC forecast, because a transport revision is the only place a second official figure can come from.