Mozambique LNG Restarts After Five Years. The Security Bargain Matters More Than the Gas Price
On 29 January 2026 Patrick Pouyanné, chairman and chief executive of TotalEnergies, met President Daniel Chapo at Afungi in Cabo Delgado province and announced the full restart of the Mozambique LNG project, onshore and offshore. It followed the partners' announcement in late October 2025 that they would lift the force majeure declared in 2021, formalised by a consortium decision on 7 November, when an insurgent attack on the nearby town of Palma forced the evacuation of the site.
TotalEnergies said more than 4,000 workers were now mobilised, over 3,000 of them Mozambican, that the project was about 40 per cent complete and that almost all engineering and procurement of main equipment had been carried out during the force majeure period. First LNG is expected in 2029. Mozambique LNG is one of the largest private investments in Africa, reported at around USD 20 billion. TotalEnergies operates it with a 26.5 per cent stake, alongside Mitsui, the Mozambican state company ENH, ONGC Videsh, Beas Rovuma, BPRL and PTTEP.
The partners have carried much of the cost of the delay already. With engineering and major equipment procurement largely done, the remaining work is construction and commissioning. The global LNG market is expected to be well supplied in the second half of the 2020s, as large expansions in Qatar and the United States come online. The shutdown in 2021 was caused by the insurgency in Cabo Delgado, which has been active since 2017. Rwandan troops deployed in 2021, alongside forces from the Southern African Development Community, pushed insurgents out of the main towns near Afungi.
Cabo Delgado is one of Mozambique's poorest provinces, and grievances over land, unemployment and the sense that gas and ruby wealth would bypass local people fed recruitment. Mozambique is already an LNG exporter through the Coral South floating LNG project operated by Eni, which began production in 2022. The restart of Mozambique LNG is the right decision for its partners and an important one for Mozambique.