The first steel plate for a floating platform that will extract natural gas in northern Mozambique begins to be cut on Thursday in Busan, South Korea, a Mozambican government source told Portuguese news agency Lusa.

The date will be announced at the construction site of South Korean shipbuilder Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) in Geoje, with a ceremony attended by the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy of Mozambique, Ernesto Max Tonela.

The platform, which was awarded to a consortium made up of Samsung Heavy Industries, France’s Technip and Japan’s JGC in May 2017, will be 439 metres long, 65 metres wide, have a draft of 38.5 metres and weigh 210,000 tons.

The gas that will be explored by the Area 4 consortium will be sold in full to BP, which in October 2016 signed an agreement to purchase the entire production for 20 years.

Discovered by ENI in 2012, the Coral field contains about 450 billion cubic metres (16 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas and in the first phase 5 billion cubic feet are expected to be extracted.

The Area 4 block’s participants are the Mozambique Rovuma Ventures, a partnership owned by the ExxonMobil, ENI and the China National Petroleum Corporation groups, which jointly control 70%, with the remaining 30% divided equally between Portuguese group Galp Energia, South Korea’s Kogas and Mozambican state-owned Empresa Nacional de Hidrocarbonetos (ENH).

The Government of Mozambique expects production to begin on 1 June, 2022, and five months later, on 1 November, the first cargo vessel carrying liquefied gas is expected to leave the country.(macauhub)