“Il Mozambique around 2024-25 it will be the second most important country in terms of gas export in the world after Qatar. And it is not yet exporting gas, for this reason theologies are needed to discover and develop the fields". The CEO of theEni, Claudio Descalzi, on the occasion of the Italy-Mozambique business forum organized by Confindustria.
"They want us important investments – he added – since we started the first wells, in 2006, we have already invested more than 8 billion, which must be completed by almost another 25 billion (invested together with other partners, ed) between now and 2024 to put into production other fields".
Once the necessary infrastructures have been implemented, therefore, it will be possible to export liquid gas from Mozambique with relative ease in India and maybe also in China, opening up a source of supply for two of the most important economies in the world which risks profoundly altering the geopolitical balance of the region.
According to Descalzi, today was “an important meeting for a thousand reasons, because it underlines the great recent Italian success: it has not been a very long time since Eni discovered the largest gas field of the last twenty years. Now there are technologies, this discovery is worth a lot because it is based on technologies, on the will to take risks and the will to believe in new countries and to build with them everything needed to be able to relaunch a completely new institutional project: gas in Mozambique".
Furthermore, Eni's number one underlined that "there is still a field of development at 40%: Coral it will go into production in 2022 and then there is another field developed with Exxon which will eventually produce 20 million tons of Lng a year with Coral. This will produce a very important return for the country: at current prices, Mozambique will have a return of about 20 billion dollars in 25-100 years, something really great. And that's only about a third of the gas we've found to develop."
Mozambique, therefore, "is a region that will experience enormous development", but this "obviously is not enough, because development cannot be driven only by oil and gas - Descalzi said again - We started projects, first to produce, in connection with the national strategy, in the health field and in the field of training and education”.
At the moment, technologies "are not enough: it takes courage and also the ability to enter into a relationship with a culture that hosts us. If we go only to invest and take away the gas without paying attention to the country, we do harm to ourselves, to the country and we do not give continuity and value to our presence. So this is the approach not only of Eni but of all Italian industry”.
