Good afternoon. Fifty kilometres off the Mozambican coast, on board the Coral South floating gas platform operated by Eni of Italy, are engineers employed not by Eni or its contractors or subcontractors, but Mozambique’s state-owned oil and gas company ENH. They are trainees, learning how to build and operate a gas platform. ENH is training technical staff all over the world, not just in Mozambique but in oil and gas-producing countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United States. Gradually, ENH is acquiring the ability to operate oil and gas production facilities itself, as its chair, Ludovina Bernardo, has said it wants to do (see below).
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Sources at the company, however, have clarified to Zitamar News that operating a project is a long-term goal and not something it intends to do imminently. That is just as well, because while ENH may have qualified engineers, its leadership team is dominated by people appointed by politicians on political grounds, with little experience of the oil and gas sector. Bernardo is one such person, having been appointed ENH chair last year after several years as deputy minister for industry and commerce, with no background in the hydrocarbons sector. Being a project operator means making high-level executive decisions about it, and it is not clear that ENH is ready to do this. But, say sources, it is working on strengthening its corporate governance and negotiating skills. Those will need to improve if ENH is to convince private oil and gas companies to invest in a project it is in charge of developing.
