MEScon Connect: Central Asia 2026 - Spotlight on Kazakhstan: growing volumes, growing opportunity

By convening in Kazakhstan, the event will engage a wider network of operating companies, technology providers, and buyers across Central Asia and China, while maintaining the Middle East as a core pillar of MEScon, strengthening regional collaboration and expanding the perspectives that define MEScon. Central Asia’s role as the world’s second-largest sulphur-producing region and its strong technical and commercial links to the Middle East and China make it an ideal location to broaden our community.

Ahead of the conference Willis Thomas, Head of CRU+, had a conversation with CRU’s Peter Harrisson, Principal, Sulphur & Sulphuric Acid Markets, who gave his insights about the event and reasons behind choosing Kazakhstan as the 2026 location.

Willis: Pete, I know that you’re about to head to MEScon, which is normally a Middle Eastern Sulphur Conference held in the Gulf, but this year I understand it’s in Kazakhstan. Can you tell me a little bit more about the trip and why it’s moved?

Peter: We’ve run MEScon for a number of years in Abu Dhabi and has attracted a significant share of local producers, but also technical audience as well.
And for this year, we are running it in in Kazakhstan, more as a shift in focus geographically, but with a very similar ethos around attracting the technical side of the market and again pushing for operational excellence, but also the commercial side of the sulphur market as well.

Central Asia as a broad basket of countries is very significant around the sulphur industry and shares some of the challenges around production economics, production process, but also logistics and geography – some of the challenges which we previously discussed at the MEScon conference in Abu Dhabi.

Willis: You’re not only going to be attending there, what else are you guys going to be doing on the ground to support the conference?

Peter: The event is intended to attract much of that local production and consumption audience, the focus is not just on the supply side production route for sulphur, but also on demand and uses. Geographically the conference is very close to other Central Asian countries, but also to China.

The intent is to bring in much of that broader industry, both the supply side predominantly in the Region from gas, but also looking at the phosphate operations, operations in uranium in other metals production and throughout industries as well.

So it’s really trying to tie together the broad value chain of sulphur, with a technical focus, but also with that commercial aspect as well. And given the geography of the Region, is a big challenge. Not having any sea is quite a difficulty when shipping products internationally.

And I think the logistics challenges are always a big issue in sulphur and one that Central Asian region really faces very acutely all of the time.

Willis: Can you give me a little bit of context and maybe some scaling on how large Central Asia is a part of that producer side?

Peter: The Middle East is still dominant in the industry. In the comparison of Middle East production and Central Asian production, although scale is different, the technologies and the sources of products that come into generating sulphur are actually very similar.

So both have significant amount of volumes of sour gas production and the challenges that come with that with increasing sulphur content within that feedstock, lots of the technology transfer, lots of the scale of production that brings are some of the reasons for why Kazakhstan specifically makes a lot of sense as a location for the event.
I think in terms of absolute scale, you have Kazakhstan that’s been exporting in and around of 7 or 8% of global trade in recent years.
Similarly Turkmenistan, other countries within the region as well adding probably a similar quantity.
So you’re not talking about a Region with a meaningless share of trade.

And I think that’s a really important thing: the volume is  growing, but also the potential that exists there is growing. It’s been quite slow in terms of new developments on production, but the opportunity is huge and there have historically been some very large projects that could happen in the Region.

Willis: What has been slowing the Central Asian production boom because obviously there’s a lot of potential there? Is it really around the logistics side or is there something else that’s holding it back?

Peter: It was the mix of logistics and geopolitics and general trend within that Region has been slower investment intent.

I think what thing that Kazakhstan has been able to do recently is attract a lot more demand side and use growth: operations in uranium industry and phosphate, fertilizer industry but also in some other sectors as well have seen growth, but the supply side of the market has been a lot slower.
To give you some context, the last large operation that commission there took nearly 15 years from the point of inception to being delivered.

So the other thing is that the complexity of that Region, you need a very long term mindset, but also a persistence to get those projects over the line. Ultimately the type of investment activity that happens in the Middle East has allowed that to happen, a lot more confidence and belief at the expense of certainty.
But I think the challenge in the Central Asian region has been uncertainty has been probably too high to see the kind of capsule investment that’s probably been needed to see that production growth.

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Join us in Almaty, Kazakhstan from 9 – 11 June

MEScon 2025 attracted 700 + delegates making it the largest sulphur-focused event in the Middle East, and one of the largest of all time. To discover more and be a part of the newest Central Asian MEScon addition visit our website: https://events.crugroup.com/middleeastsulphur