Oil company Total this Wednesday said that the natural gas project in Mozambique remains on schedule and that construction work should restart this quarter after violence in the region suspended work.
“It is not because we have stopped for two or three months that we cannot reach the 2024 target,” the company’s chief executive Patrick Pouyanné said during the press conference to present the 2020 results.
The onshore works are suspended, but the engineering part is progressing rapidly and work off the coast continues, he added, in statements quoted by the Bloomberg financial information agency, in which he said that an agreement has been reached to ensure the safety of the area of the works in the northern part of the country.
Responsibility for security in the area falls to the government, Pouyanné said, adding that there was a plan to deploy forces in the region to control a perimeter of at least 25 kilometres, but that ideally, the entire province of Cabo Delgado should be secure.
The Mozambique LNG project includes, as well as France’s Total, the National Hydrocarbons Company, Mitsui, Videsh, PTT Exploration & Production, Bharat Petroleum and Oil India.
Several analysts have said that with the current unsafe conditions in the region the project is unlikely to be able to start exporting natural gas by 2024.
Pouyanné said there should be around 10,000 workers on site, but currently, less than 1,000 Total employees are at the site.
The armed violence in Cabo Delgado is causing a humanitarian crisis with more than 2,000 deaths and 560,000 displaced people without housing or food, mainly concentrated in the provincial capital, Pemba.
Total reported record losses of US$7.24B (€5.98B) last year, a transformation year to refocus on new energy, against profits of US$9.31B the year before.
This result was caused by the negative effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on economic activity and the historic drop in oil prices, Total justified in a statement.
Patrick Pouyanné will propose at the general meeting of shareholders in May that the oil group be renamed TotalEnergies, to symbolise openness to new energy sources, including renewables, as part of its strategy of seeking zero polluting emissions.
Throughout this decade, Total will focus more on natural gas and renewable energies, while oil will constitute, in 2030, only 30% of its activity, compared to 55% today.
