Aktau International Airport — Aktau, Kazakhstan

Aktau International Airport serves the port city of Aktau on Kazakhstan's Caspian Sea coast, a planned settlement built during the Soviet era to support offshore oil exploration and the extraction industries that still dominate the regional economy of Mangystau Region. Flights through SCO connect oil and gas workers, engineers, and business travelers to Kazakhstan's larger cities such as Almaty and the capital Astana, as well as to destinations across the wider Caspian basin. Aktau itself is unusual among Kazakh cities for its grid-planned layout and modernist Soviet architecture, built essentially from scratch on an arid coastal steppe with little fresh water, which had to be piped or desalinated for the growing population. The airport's role has expanded alongside offshore drilling activity in Kazakhstan's sector of the Caspian Sea, one of the world's most significant emerging hydrocarbon basins over the past few decades.