Mozambique has formally restarted construction of the $20+ billion Mozambique LNG project operated by TotalEnergies (TTEF.PA) in Cabo Delgado. This comes after a five-year suspension, marking a new turn for the economic development in the nation and a mega-project whose value could extend to other African countries.
In 2025, Mozambique’s nominal GDP was approximately $24 billion, and grew at a modest 2.5–2.7%, that underscored the asymmetry. This single LNG investment is not merely large; it is macroeconomically dominant. Its scale guarantees impact.
READ ALSO: Inside China’s Largest BRI Project in Nigeria: Ogidigben Gas Industrial Park
The Mozambique LNG project, situated in the Rovuma Basin’s Area 1, is a global energy mega-project with a total investment of approximately $20 to $20.5 billion, reflecting significant cost inflation. Designed for a production capacity of 13.1 million tonnes per annum, it is led by operator TotalEnergies and targets its first gas delivery in 2029. The international consortium includes major stakeholders such as Mitsui, Mozambique’s national oil company ENH, and several Indian and Thai firms.
The development is set to be a transformative economic driver for Mozambique, with projections estimating state revenues of up to $35 billion over the project’s lifetime. Its scale and strategic importance position it as one of the world’s most significant greenfield liquefied natural gas initiatives. If realised as planned, Mozambique would enter the top 10 global LNG exporters by 2030, repositioning Southern Africa within global gas markets.
The 2021 suspension of the Mozambique LNG project after the Palma attack exposed deep vulnerabilities in the region’s governance, including weak state presence, local underdevelopment, and community alienation, leading to a five-year force majeure that saw financiers withdraw, costs sharply escalate, and require TotalEnergies to absorb more equity, making the 2026 restart a stressed reset rather than a simple continuation.
The project’s resumption has been made possible by a deliberate “fortress model” of security concentrated on the Afungi peninsula. This enclave is protected by a multinational military presence, including Rwandan, SADC, and Mozambican forces, creating a secure bubble for construction and operations. However, this strategy has merely displaced the insurgency rather than defeating it, protecting the capital while leaving the surrounding communities vulnerable.
This approach creates a significant structural paradox and long-term risk. It entrenches a stark spatial inequality of security, where peace is guaranteed only where investment is concentrated, and ties economic survival to a militarised logic dependent on foreign troops. Furthermore, it raises critical questions about sustainability, as LNG facilities can be defended indefinitely, but a society cannot be built or secured on such an exclusionary and externally dependent foundation.
Historically, enclave security has produced brittle outcomes from Nigeria’s Niger Delta to Angola’s Cabinda. Stability tied to infrastructure rather than citizenship tends to outlast both.
Unless gas revenues are visibly converted into regional development, services, and political inclusion, Cabo Delgado risks remaining a conflict-prone periphery orbiting a fortified export machine.
The Mozambique LNG project holds the transformative promise of multiplying export earnings, stabilising the national currency, and funding vast public investments, with potential lifetime revenues rivalling years of national budgets. However, this macroeconomic gamble carries severe risks, including exposure to volatile global gas prices and the country’s own history of elite rent capture and fiscal opacity. Without stringent sovereign wealth management and transparent oversight, the windfall could amplify instability rather than resolve it.
The project’s social contract is equally precarious. While touted local employment and training figures are positive, LNG is inherently capital-intensive, offering limited long-term jobs. True development hinges on whether Mozambican firms can capture value in supply chains and move up the value ladder. Furthermore, the project’s social legitimacy is contested due to community displacement, exclusion from decision-making, and ongoing legal scrutiny, risking the creation of a globally integrated yet locally alienated dual economy.
TotalEnergies, as the long-term operator and steward of Africa’s largest private investment, carries heightened expectations for developmental alignment and political influence. Yet, as a shareholder-driven corporation, its incentives are ultimately commercial and risk-averse. The fundamental burden of translating this massive investment into a broad-based national transformation, therefore, rests with Mozambican institutions and governance, not with the foreign operator.
Regionally, the project recalibrates Southern Africa’s energy landscape, positioning Mozambique as a strategic gas anchor and reducing regional import dependence. However, this expansion coincides with global decarbonization pressures and long-term demand uncertainty. Mozambique is betting that gas will remain geopolitically indispensable long enough to fund its own economic diversification in a fiercely competitive global market.
In conclusion, the project is an amplifier that will magnify the country’s strengths. Success by 2029 and beyond will not be measured by export volumes alone, but by whether security extends beyond the project enclave, revenues visibly fund non-extractive sectors, local firms join value chains, and fiscal and political resilience strengthens. Mozambique now walks a narrow corridor between historic opportunity and structural failure, where this mega-project will not forgive a weak state but will decisively reveal it.
