Mozambique is considering using the reservoirs resulting from the extraction of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to capture carbon dioxide (CO2), as provided for in the National Maritime Spatial Plan (POEM).
“Promote CO2 sequestration projects, using the reservoirs resulting from LNG extraction, allowing operations to be maintained, with clear environmental benefits, for several more decades,” reads the strategic axes and objectives of the POEM, drawn up in 2021 and only approved at the end of 2024 by Mozambique’s government.
Carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas, and its sequestration process aims to capture and store it to reduce its presence in the atmosphere and its effects on climate change.
A study by consultancy Deloitte concluded in 2024 that Mozambique’s LNG reserves—currently under development or under study by oil multinationals such as TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, and Eni—represent potential revenues of $100 billion (€96.2 billion), highlighting the country’s international importance in the energy transition.
“The country’s vast gas reserves could make Mozambique one of the world’s top ten producers, responsible for 20% of Africa’s production by 2040,” says the report.
In this area, the POEM also plans to “ensure the legislative, administrative and governmental frameworks and national receptiveness to hydrocarbon exploration and production activities”, to “overcome environmental opposition and possible conflicts of interest with other activities”.
The document also mentions the need to “reduce the impacts resulting from the implementation of industrial and urban infrastructures and exploration and production activities, on the coastal space and in interaction with other activities, particularly those of a local nature (fishing and tourism)”.
Among dozens of other measures set out in the POEM is Mozambique’s ratification of the 2021 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), “to help protect the more than 300 shipwrecks from various eras inventoried along the coast” of Mozambique in the Indian Ocean.
The document also envisages “boosting maritime tourism activities related to “wreck diving” by taking advantage” of this number of shipwrecks “and the numerous discoveries of important underwater archaeological remains around Mozambique Island”.
Mozambique’s maritime space covers an area of around 572,000 square kilometres (km2). It encompasses “countless mineral and ecological riches of great importance for increasing the country’s development capacity”, including 12,000 km2 of conservation areas currently “subject to threats that include overfishing, unregulated exploitation of natural resources, inappropriate tourism practices, pollution, extreme weather events (such as storms and cyclones) and urban and industrial development of the coastal strip”.
The country also has a coastline of 2,700 kilometres, “including extensive sandy beaches with dunes and coastal lagoons, swamps and mangroves, estuaries and coral reefs”, considered “in itself a significant natural resource, even considered to be the country’s most valuable natural resource”, reads the POEM.
Lusa
