Asian capital holds the majority
The scheme is anchored by Mozambique LNG, the TotalEnergies-operated development in Area 1 of the Rovuma Basin, which will take the first output as it resumes activity following the lifting of force majeure. Yet the venture’s ownership tells an Asian story. Mitsui & Co. of Japan holds 20 percent, India’s ONGC Videsh, Bharat Petroleum and the Beas Rovuma vehicle add ten percent apiece, and Thailand’s PTTEP a further 8.5 percent — together a clear majority of the project that will absorb the first barrels of Mozambique coconut biodiesel.
The programme itself has already moved from plan into the field. The first coconut palms went into the ground in early 2025, a seedling nursery is running in Palma, and planting ramps from roughly 110,000 seedlings this year toward about 440,000 new palms by 2027, alongside some 200,000 existing trees. The seed stock is selected for resistance to Lethal Yellowing, the disease that has hollowed out coconut plantations across the region, and rests on a research protocol built with Mozambican government bodies and academic partners.
Food and fuel, grown together
Food security is engineered into the model rather than traded against it. More than 3,000 farmers in Palma receive seedlings, technical and phytosanitary support and food-crop seeds under an agroforestry protocol that requires coconut and food crops to be intercropped in a syntropic-style system. The effort is expected to create more than 130 jobs in deployment and a comparable number once the agro-industrial plant comes on stream around 2029.
The ambition is deliberately staged. A first phase targets around 5,000 tonnes of biodiesel a year for self-consumption, substituting imported diesel in the operations that anchor it; a guaranteed offtake lets the model prove itself before a second phase scales production toward a domestic Mozambican biofuel supply that trims reliance on imported refined fuel.
A processing asset, not just a fuel
The value chain runs from farmers through a central hub in the Olumbe community to a coconut processing plant designed to yield not only biodiesel but activated carbon, briquettes and copra meal, giving Cabo Delgado several revenue streams rather than one. For the Asian partners more accustomed to gas trains than groves, the Mozambique coconut biodiesel venture is a low-cost way to deepen local content and build an agricultural base intended to outlast the construction cycle, and to keep a foothold in a market where Asian capital already runs deep.
