Instituto Nacional de Petroleo (INP) has approved 12 of the 13 companies for pre-qualification in its sixth licence round.
The only company that did not get through was Nigeria’s Aiteo Eastern Exploration and Production.
Qualifying as operators were CNOOC Ltd, Sinopec International Energy Investment, Eni Mozambico, ExxonMobil Mozambique (Offshore 6), Petro China International Iraq and TotalEnergies EP New Venture.
INP chose the remaining six as non-operators. These were Discover Exploration, Novatek, ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL), Qatar Petroleum Mozambique, RN Angoche and Sasol Africa.
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Mozambique did not explain why Aiteo had not pre-qualified, apart from to say it did not meet the requirements.
Under the next stage, the companies will licence geoscience data in order to evaluate the areas of interest. Companies can see data at INP’s physical or virtual dataroom.
Companies will need to submit proposals by August 30, 2022. Mozambique will publish the results on November 30.
No fee was liable for pre-qualification. To submit an application, companies must pay 2 million meticais ($31,360).
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Under the original pre-qualifying requirements, operators had to prove they had a market capitalisation or assets of at least $1 billion. This increased to $2 billion if they wanted to work in the deepwater. Non-operators, meanwhile, had to show a market cap of $250 million.
INP revised the requirements downwards in February. Operators had to then have $1bn, while non-operators $125mn.
The authorities required companies to show financial statements for the last three years, in addition to descriptions of other obligations.
