Exxon Mobil will create of Africa’s largest liquefied natural gas facility. The company recently announced the formation of a consortium of contractors to take its objectives forward. The beneficiary country will be Mozambique. An investment to the tune of US $33 billion will go into enlargement of Mozambique’s Rovuma LNG complex. The project has the potential to transform the Mozambique’s US$ 15 billion economy, create thousands of jobs, give exchequer more money to work with, and raise people’s standard of living.
Upon exploiting the true potential of the project, experts predict that Mozambique could become the world’s third largest LNG exporter, increasing Africa’s roughly 8 percent share of global gas exports.
Mozambique also can emerge as a key supplier to African countries wishing to use gas to stabilize their unreliable electrical power grids. Erratic and inadequate power supply is a continent-wide problem that holds back economic growth of the region.
Exxon Mobil will be transforming Rovuma into a giant plant. To begin with, Exxon had acquired a sizable stake in the project from Eni in 2017. The deal specified that Eni would concentrate on getting the gas out of the ground while Exxon Mobil would focus on the gas-liquefaction part of the venture.
That is in tandem with the developments taking place elsewhere for unbundling in the gas and electricity sectyor. For instance, the United States is liquefying shale gas for export. Qatar and Australia are big LNG suppliers of the US gas. Russia, which has relied for decades on pipelines to transport gas to Europe, Turkey, China and elsewhere, is making an LNG push. Equatorial Guinea has an LNG sales deal with Ghana and a transport infrastructure agreement with Burkina Faso. Africa consumed less than 4 percent of the world’s natural gas consumption of 4 trillion cubic centimeters a year in 2018. This low consumption is due to almost non existence of pipelines to deliver gas from producing to consuming nations — or even from one end of a producing nation to the other.
With African population set to peak at 1.2 billion in the near future, the continent will have to depend more on gas not alone for their cooking and fuel for automobiles but also for running utilities. South Africa has plans for a 3,000-megawatt, LNG-fueled electricity plant. Egypt has already chartered two floating vessels for LNG storage, while Morocco and Ghana are also considering LNG-import facilities.
