Good afternoon. In some ways, it is a rather odd time for French energy firm TotalEnergies to be announcing the restart of work on its liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Cabo Delgado province, something that happened at a ceremony at the project site today attended by President Daniel Chapo.
The company had been expected to announce a restart on the project, known as Mozambique LNG, at some point in the second half of last year. Chief executive Patrick Pouyanné said in July that they would make a decision by September, but no decision came. By then, Zitamar News had already reported what was causing the delay: failure between TotalEnergies and the Mozambican government to agree on adding $4.5bn to the project’s tax-deductible expenses in order to reflect costs incurred by the project being delayed for over four years due to the insurgent threat.
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Now the project is officially “restarting”, although the reality is that it restarted many months ago. Zitamar reported a source close to the project back in August as saying: “We are currently beyond the preparatory work for restarting”. By then, the waters around the Mozambique LNG site on the Afungi peninsula were being dredged, and contractor Daewoo was doing preparatory work to build the LNG trains that will liquefy the gas.
