Rome, March 26, 2025 – ReCommon today publishes “Hidden Flames”, a new report on the climate impacts associated with ENI’s Coral South FLNG project off the coast of Mozambique. From the analysis of public data and satellite images examined by the association and its consultants, it can be deduced that ENI’s extraction and liquefaction plant has been responsible for numerous flaring phenomena since it began operating in 2022: phenomena not adequately reported by the oil and gas company. Flaring involves the practice of torching the excess gas extracted together with other hydrocarbons, which has significant impacts on the climate, the environment and – in the vicinity of residential areas – on people.
Between June and December 2022 alone, flaring operations have expected to waste 435,000 cubic meters of gas, equivalent to about 40% of Mozambique’s annual needs. Episodes have also been repeated on numerous other days in subsequent years.
According to ReCommon’s estimates, based on NASA data, for every hour of flaring that occurred on just one day – 13 January 2024 – ENI torched as much gas as an average Italian family consumes in 8 and a half years.
The Italian corporation has given public assurances that «the investments were made ensuring full compliance with the standards of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Equatorial Principles (sic)». However, the “full compliance” claimed by ENI translates into total emissions from Coral South FLNG being underestimated by seven times.
In the environmental impact assessment for the project, which gave little importance to flaring, the overall emissions of the project were assessed as “negligible”, estimated at just 150,000 tons of CO2e per year.
However, World Bank data reveals that in just the six months between June and December 2022 emissions amounted to 1,098,188 tCO2e. Considering that Mozambique’s total emissions for 2022 were 10,028,180 tCO2e, in six months the Coral South’s flaring emissions alone represented 11.2% of Mozambique’s annual emissions, up 11.68% compared to 2021.
Overall, the total emissions associated with the entire value chain of Coral South FLNG and the twin project Coral North FLNG (which has not yet been built and for which ENI is preparing to raise capital on the market) over the expected 25 years of operation would be equal to 1 billion tonnes of CO2e: more than three times Italy’s emissions in 2023 alone.
In response to a question raised by ReCommon about possible flaring incidents related to Coral South FLNG, ENI told shareholders at its 2024 Annual General Meeting that such incidents «were limited to the initial testing phase and sporadic cases of plant restarts».
The statement stands in stark contradiction to what was reported in September 2023 by GALP, ENI’s Portuguese counterpart, which at the time held a shareholding in the Coral South project.
In a document prepared for the Climate Disclosure Project (CDP), an organization based in the United Kingdom and among the most respected international voices on the subject of reporting environmental and social impacts also in the corporate arena, GALP reported: «The commissioning phase of the Coral FLNG, in Mozambique, involved substantial flaring, leading to a temporary spike in scope 1 emissions during the second half of 2022». That is the period of time already mentioned as one of the most characterized by the phenomenon of flaring.
«Italy’s foremost multinational corporation is preparing to knock on the door of public and private financiers for the construction of Coral North FLNG, with the Italian export credit agency SACE and Intesa Sanpaolo in the front row, joined by KEXIM and K-Sure in South Korea. We wonder how these institutions, after having financed Coral South FLNG following poor environmental due diligence, can do now fund the twin project Coral North FLNG given the impacts associated with flaring», said Simone Ogno of ReCommon.
«The much-vaunted ‘flagship’ of cooperation between Italy and Mozambique has never been such: ENI has tried to diminish the operational difficulties and underestimated the effects of the flaring associated with Coral South FLNG, a project that brings no energy security either to Italy or even less to Mozambique. In a country where systemic violence and environmental impacts are also linked to the activities of the oil and gas industry, ENI’s contribution largely comes in the form of greenhouse gas emissions. A scenario that might deteriorate with the new Coral North FLNG project», added Eva Pastorelli of ReCommon.
