Drilling is now under way on the wells that will feed Mozambique's second floating LNG facility. Eni and its Area 4 partners kicked off the drilling and completion campaign for Coral North on 2 November, working toward a project start-up targeted for 2028 in the Rovuma Basin.
The roughly 10-month campaign is being executed by ENH-Saipem Drilling Company SA using the Saipem 12000 drillship, targeting the northern part of the Coral reservoir in Area 4. Eni highlighted a milestone in the arrangement: it is the first time a company with Mozambican participation will take a direct operational role in the country's offshore drilling. The operator's partners in Area 4 are China National Petroleum Corp, Empresa Nacional de Hidrocarbonetos, Korea Gas Corp and XRG. Once online, Coral North will lift Mozambique's LNG output to 7 million tonnes per year, building on the Coral South FLNG facility that anchored the country's entry into the export market.
The Coral North campaign carries lessons well beyond Mozambique. For drilling contractors, a dedicated 10-month deepwater program in East Africa confirms that the regional market now has a second active leg alongside the established West African and Middle East scopes, tightening the deepwater rig balance into 2027. For equipment and valve suppliers, FLNG projects concentrate some of the most demanding specifications in the industry: cryogenic topsides service, high-pressure wellstream choke systems, subsea riser systems and topsides isolation valves are all long-lead items that were ordered long before the drillship moved on location. The 2028 start-up target leaves a defined window for follow-on scopes, since completion equipment, chemicals, intervention services and inspection tooling will be procured as each well is drilled and handed over. The ENH-Saipem joint venture structure is also worth watching. Pairing an international drilling contractor with the national oil company created a compliant path for local participation without compromising operational standards, and the first-direct-operational-role framing suggests Maputo will expect similar structures on future blocks. EPC contractors bidding LNG-adjacent work in the region should assume that local operational participation is now a scoring criterion rather than a formality. Finally, adding Coral North volume strengthens Mozambique's position as an Atlantic-basin LNG supplier just as European and Asian buyers hunt for uncommitted molecules later this decade, a demand signal that keeps downstream investment, and the valve and rotating equipment orders that follow it, alive.