The Temane Thermal Power Plant (CTT), a project that will produce 450 Megawatts of electricity, budgeted at 650 million US dollars, will start operations this year (2024), according to the project plan and the Mozambican government’s prospects.
It is the first gas-fired power station of this size to be built in the country after independence, and will produce clean energy, an important factor particularly at a time when Mozambique is setting the guidelines for its Energy Transition Strategy.
Construction of the project, which began in March 2022, is progressing according to plan and the start-up of operations is expected to remain unchanged, as execution is currently above 60 per cent, bringing the plan to produce energy using natural gas from the Pande, Temane and Inhassoro deposits ever closer, in order to enable the generation of energy that will feed the country and export to the region.
This project is expected to increase the country’s installed energy production capacity by around 16%, helping to meet the demand of around 1.5 million families under the Universal Access to Energy Programme by 2030.
The initiative is part of the government’s policy which has prioritised boosting industrial development through the use of natural gas, creating an attractive legal framework for investors.
In fact, it is within this framework that a public-private partnership formed by Globeleq, Electricidade de Moçambique and SASOL, was granted a concession valid for 25 years, with the asset to be transferred to the Mozambican state at the end of the contract.
As a constant monitoring action, in the last quarter of 2023, Mozambique’s Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, Carlos Zacarias, said that the construction of the country’s largest gas-fired power station was almost ready, with the expectation that the infrastructure would come into operation this year (2024).
“We have seen substantial progress of around 65 per cent, a substantial progress that satisfies us,” Zacarias said at the time, speaking to the press after visiting the Temane Thermal Power Plant in the Inhassoro district of Inhambane province, southern Mozambique.
According to data from Globeleq, the multinational with a majority stake in the infrastructure, in addition to natural gas, the project will also reuse the steam generated by that resource to produce an additional amount of electricity.
As part of the same project, a transport line is being built between Temane, in Inhassoro, and Maputo province, stretching 563 kilometres and costing more than 400 million dollars.
It should be noted that CTT is 85 per cent owned by Mozambique Power Invest (MPI) and 15 per cent by Sasol Africa, where MPI is owned by Globeleq (76 per cent) and EDM (24 per cent).
