Mozambique: New plant will replace 70% of cooking gas imports

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Mozambique: New plant will replace 70% of cooking gas imports

8:35 CAT | 29 Sep 2023

File photo: Lusa

Mozambique will start producing bottled cooking gas in 2024, which will reduce national imports by 70%, the minister of mineral resources and energy, Carlos Zacarias, said on Thursday.

“From 2024, Mozambique will produce around 30,000 tonnes of LPG [Liquefied Petroleum Gas] a year, which will reduce imports by around 70%,” he said at the 8th Mozambique Gas and Energy Summit, which has been taking place since Wednesday in Maputo.

At stake is a project by the South African oil company Sasol to produce cooking gas in Mozambique from March next year, taking into account that it already explores gas production in the country in Temane (Inhassoro) and Pande (Govuro), Inhambane province. The foundation stone for this venture was laid on 27 March 2022 in Inhassoro by Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi.

As well as cooking gas, the company plans to produce gas to feed the Temane Thermal Power Station and light oil for export.

These three projects, according to previous information from Sasol, are part of the Production Sharing Agreement (PSA), worth $760 million (€721.1 million), signed in 2020 with the Mozambican government, for the production of natural gas for electricity generation, 30,000 tonnes of cooking gas and the daily production of 4,000 barrels of light oil for export.

READ: Mozambique: Government to invest over US$20 million for cooking gas production in Temane – AIM report

“Natural gas, in particular, is a safe alternative for energy transition due to its advantages as a less polluting energy source,” Minister Carlos Zacarias said at the event.

Mozambique has three development projects approved to exploit the natural gas reserves in the Rovuma basin, classified as one of the largest in the world, off the coast of Cabo Delgado.

Two of these projects are larger and involve channelling the gas from the seabed to land, cooling it in a plant and exporting it by sea as a liquid.

One is led by TotalEnergies (Area 1 consortium), and work progressed until it was suspended indefinitely after the terrorist attacks in Palma in March 2021, when the French energy company declared that it would only resume work when the area was safe.

The other is the as-yet-unannounced investment led by ExxonMobil and Eni (Area 4 consortium).

“We want the Rovuma basin projects to resume,” said Minister Carlos Zacarias at the same event.

A third completed project, on a smaller scale, also belongs to the Area 4 consortium (Coral Sul, led by ENI) and consists of a floating platform for capturing and processing gas for export directly at sea, which began operating in November 2022.

According to Zacarias, the floating platform has already reached 90% of its production capacity, and this week, it delivered the 28th shipment of Liquefied Natural Gas for the European and Asian markets.

Source: Lusa