By Prosper Mejebor, in Dar es Salaam
Mozambican and South African Presidents were present at last week’s inauguration of an integrated hydrocarbon processing facility (IHPF) in Inhambane province, in the south of Mozambique.
Part of the new facility is a 30,000 Tons Per Year (TPA) Liquefied Petroleum Gas Plant, the first such project to produce LPG from Mozambique’s gas resources.
No one said that this was a scalable, modular plant.
The capacity represents 75% of the country’s consumption, so it is a huge influx of cooking fuel in this eastern corner of Southern Africa.
Daniel Chapo, the Mozambican president cheered the “ambitious” project.
He was joined in several photo ops by Cyril Ramaphosa, his South African counterpart.
The fact that 35Million Mozambicans consume only 40,000Tons of LPG per year should be a worrisome data point. But the Mozambican government did not appear embarrassed.
The celebration spoke to the small scale mindedness of Africa’s industrial effort.
The IHPF will also supply “methane-rich gas” to the nearby 450MW Temane gas-fired power plant, (still under construction by Globeleq) and produce light oil for export.
Back of the envelope calculation indicates that the feedstock for that plant should be around 80Million standard cubic feet of gas per day (MMscf/d), but in subsahara Africa, thermal (gas) power plants hardly reach their capacity on average.
For 21 years, Sasol, the South African petrochemical giant, has consistently exported over 350Million standard cubic feet of gas per day of gas from Mozambique to both its own plants and its customers in South Africa.
In that time, Mozambique itself has taken in less than 70MMsf/d into its economy.
Part of the assigned domestic volume is pumped through a branch of the Moz –S.A pipeline that goes to Matola, a suburb in the west of Maputo, enroute to several industries, including the Mozal aluminium smelter. A slightly smaller volume, 15MMscf/d is distributed through a 30 Kilometre pipeline from Matola to Marracuene to households, hospitals, hotels restaurants and other institutions.
Now everyone is cheering the inauguration of a 30,000TPA LPG plant in a country with 100Trilion cubic feet of gas (proven). There is no clear line of sight to a robust increase in LPG demand, even as over 80% of the population uses dirty fuels for cooking. Yet at the next energy conference in Lagos, Accra, Windhoek, Juba or Johannesburg, speaker after speaker will “lament” the international conspiracy to disallow Africa from using its hydrocarbons for its economic development.
