Kazakhstan, one of the world’s top ten oil producers, saw its crude output rebound sharply in June, reaching levels that matched its previous all-time high. This jump was largely driven by a surge at the Chevron-led Tengiz field, highlighting the country’s accelerating push to maximize oil revenues even as it repeatedly breaches its OPEC+ production limits.

Kazakhstan’s daily crude oil output — excluding gas condensate — surged by 7.5% last month to 1.88 million barrels per day. That figure equals the record high set in March and stands significantly above Kazakhstan’s official OPEC+ quota of 1.5 million bpd for June.

Washington has redrawn the map of what counts as strategically indispensable, tacking ten more materials onto its critical minerals roster and, in the process, broadening the government’s industrial policy toolkit. Copper’s inclusion is the headline shift. Long treated as a ubiquitous industrial metal, it now joins a club that steers federal incentives, shapes permitting priorities, and guides stockpiling, an acknowledgement that the wiring of the future economy, from EV motors and transmission lines to data centers, rests on an increasingly tight supply foundation.

Metallurgical coal’s addition is equally telling. By elevating the feedstock for coke and thus blast-furnace steel alongside uranium, boron, lead, phosphate, potash, rhenium, silicon, and silver, the Interior Department is signaling that the backbone materials of energy, defense, food security, and advanced manufacturing must be secured at home or from trusted partners.

Asia’s LNG market is adjusting to the Gulf shock, but it is doing so through contraction rather than resilience. Imports are set to fall to about 19.03 million metric tons in April, the lowest since June 2020. That decline reflects the near disappearance of Qatari supply to Asia after the closure of Hormuz, with April arrivals from Qatar expected to collapse to about 800,000 tons from an average of just over 6 million tons in the three months before the war.

What makes this adjustment look less chaotic than the oil market is that the burden is being distributed unevenly. China, the region’s biggest LNG buyer, is absorbing much of the shock by cutting imports sharply and, earlier in the crisis, even reselling cargoes into a tight market.