The Mozambican Government is considering a project led by Italian energy company Eni for the deployment of a second floating liquefied natural gas plant called the Coral North project to match the Coral South plant that went on stream in November 2022.
Agência de Informação de Moçambique (AIM), the official Mozambique news agency, carried the report in its latest bulletin.
The project will be developed by a consortium headed by Italian oil and gas major Eni and was in the “pre-viability environmental study” stage for deployment in the Rovuma Basin offshore Mozambique.
The Eni study was cited by AIM as saying that the second FLNG plant would be “the most efficient way to maximise the recovery and profitability of the gas reserves” of the Coral natural gas field.
FLNG costs
“The investment envisaged in the second platform is US$7 billion and is still subject to approval by the Mozambican government,” said the official news agency.
“Under the current schedule, the new platform would begin to produce LNG in the second half of 2027,” it said.
“That means that the platform will be in production before the onshore LNG plant planned for the Afungi Peninsula in Palma district by French oil and gas company TotalEnergies,” added the report.
“The resumption of work by TotalEnergies will depend on whether the French company is satisfied with the recent improvements in the security situation,” said AIM.
The report said that the Mozambique Government expects the Coral North FLNG plant to be anchored about 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) from the existing Coral South facility which has been liquefying natural gas since October 2022.
“The platform has the capacity to produce 3.37 million tonnes of LNG a year and the Coral North platform would double that figure,” it said.
The first LNG cargo was lifted on the 13th of November 2022 from the “Coral Sul FLNG” vessel.
Upstream operator
Eni is the upstream operator of the Area 4 licence resources containing the Coral gas reservoir.
The “Coral-Sul FLNG” vessel was constructed at Samsung Heavy Industries shipyard in Geoje in South Korea and is the first floating LNG facility ever deployed in the deep waters of East Africa.
The other partners of Eni in the first FLNG project were US major ExxonMobil Corp., China National Petroleum Corp., Galp Energia of Portugal, Korea Gas Corp. and Mozambique’s Empresa Nacional de Hidrocarbonetos (ENH), the state energy company.
BP of the UK has a long-term agreement spanning over 20 years to purchase 100 percent of LNG output from the Coral South FLNG venture.
The new Coral North project was first mentioned by the Coral gas field shareholders to Mozambique President Filipe Jacinto Nyusi when the President visited the “Coral-Sul FLNG” vessel for a ceremony on November 24, 2022.
“They discussed with the President the possibility of replicating the success of the Coral South project with further FLNG developments as well as other onshore projects,” said Eni at the time.
