Standard Bank's chief economist, Faúsio Mussá, foresees that the retreat of armed violence will allow work on the gas liquefaction plant in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, to restart in the first half of 2023.

"Improved safety conditions may dictate the resumption of construction work on the TotalEnergies complex on the Afungi Peninsula in the first half of next year," reads the analysis distributed today.

The work represents the largest investment in Africa, to the tune of 20 billion euros, and was suspended in April 2021 after armed groups attacked the town of Palma, causing an undisclosed death toll among residents and foreign workers.

"Our expectation is that the project will start exporting gas from 2026, which means that between the end of this year and the first half of 2023 Total Energies should resume construction," he stressed.

Work was once scheduled to resume this year, but the company has announced that it wants to see safety normalized in the region and has postponed further evaluation until the end of 2022.

"In principle, it is likely that the Final Investment Decision" for another adjacent project, from Exxon, "will be made within a maximum period of 12 months after the takeover" of French Total Energies, Fáusio Mussá concluded.

There are three projects to extract gas from the reserves in the Rovuma basin (which are among the largest in the world), through boreholes at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, 40 kilometers off Cabo Delgado.

However, only the smallest project, in mar-alto, is ready to start up.

This is the Coral Sul project led by ENI with an offshore liquefaction plant on a floating platform that from the next few months will inject the liquid gas into cargo ships, with production being sold for 20 years to the BP oil company.

The other two projects receive the gas onshore and can produce four times as much liquefied natural gas (LNG) each, but are stalled due to insecurity: TotalEnergies' project was halted during construction, while ExxonMobil's has not even reached an investment decision yet. (Impala/Lusa)