Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev urged his government on Wednesday to step up exploration of new natural resource deposits in his oil-rich Central Asian state.

Kazakhstan, roughly the size of Western Europe, is home to some of the world’s biggest energy and metals deposits and has drawn billions of dollars of foreign investment since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Addressing parliament in his annual state of the nation speech, Nazarbayev said it was time to intensify exploration of the nation’s riches.

Together with the government we have to finally solve the question of exploration of new deposits, and Kazakhstan has many of them,” he said in his opening remarks shown on television.

“We have not done enough to explore our country’s vast territory.”

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