The paper/ presentation will attempt to answer or, better, to bring light to the questions regarding the challenges of reducing carbon emissions of the mining industry and the fact that decarbonisation, if well done and properly planned, will require the extraction of more minerals than ever before in our traditional economy. Therefore, such extraction will require to address important knowledge gaps, not only in terms of scenarios for just transition but also as far as, what reasonable alternatives are up there?. These alternatives are necessary for reducing the impact on “coal transition choices” which are mainly based on carbon emissions. However, decisions supporting various alternatives (or geospatial scenarios) need to take into account geographically related GDP changes, employment situations, coal and power dependency, among other available parameters and variables obtained from processed datasets. A key social and economic result of any type of decarbonization scenario analysis is the question on, how the trained coal mining workforces can be used (or adapted) for mining other types of mineral commodities that are highly demanded by the new “green economy” and which are present in Kazakhstan? Transition stages must be associated to the identification and further exploitation of critical minerals as “substitutes” from regional income and employment expected decreases. The new “green economy” minerals are much needed for revitalizing local economies. Studies have shown that the “green economy” will require, at least, between 6 to 8 times more minerals (e.g. EV, wind turbines, etc…) than in the past. Thus, the Kazakhstan region and central Asia in general is well endowed with those highly valuable critical minerals whose resources are not yet estimated for proper planning.