London — The tanker British Mentor is on its way to the northern province of Cabo Delgado to pick up the first-ever supply of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) produced in Mozambique.

According to the ship tracking website Marine Traffic, British Mentor is currently heading north of the South African port of Durban. Meanwhile, the Bloomberg news agency reports that it is due to arrive at the Coral South Floating LNG terminal, off the Cabo Delgado coast, on 24 August.

The LNG will be produced by the consortium led by the Italian energy company, ENI. The platform, built in a Korean shipyard, arrived in Mozambican waters in January and is now anchored in Area Four of the Rovuma Basin, some 40 kilometres from the mainland. This is the first deep-water platform in the world to operate at a water depth of about two thousand meters.

Once fully operational, the terminal will produce 3.4 million tonnes of LNG per year. All of its output over the next 20 years has been bought by the British company BP. According to Bloomberg, ENI is already planning to build a second floating platform which could come onstream in less than four years.

The Coral Sul project lies within the Area Four concession and will be the first of three projects to produce LNG in Mozambique. The main participant in Area Four is Mozambique Rovuma Ventures, a partnership between ENI, the US oil and gas giant ExxonMobil and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which together control 70 per cent of the undertaking. The remaining 30 per cent is divided equally between the Mozambican state enterprise ENH, Galp Energia of Portugal, and Kogas of South Korea.

The other major venture currently underway is the Mozambique LNG Project using gas from Rovuma Basin Offshore Area One. The French oil and gas company, TotalEnergies, is the operator with its partners coming from Japan, India, Thailand, and Mozambique. When operational, the project will produce 12.88 million tonnes of LNG per year for domestic consumption and export. Progress with this project has been held up following the decision of TotalEnergies in April 2021 to declare force majeure following an insurgent attack near the Afungi Peninsula where the onshore LNG facility will be constructed.

A third development, the Rovuma LNG Project, will use gas from offshore Area Four to produce 15 million tonnes of LNG a year. However, the operator, ExxonMobil, has not yet taken its final investment decision.