TotalEnergies said on Friday that its liquefied natural gas project in the restive northeastern Cabo Delgado province would be able to resume, four years after it was suspended under force majeure following a 2021 jihadist attack that killed an estimated 800 people.

In a letter addressed Friday to Mozambique's President Daniel Chapo and seen by AFP, the group's chief executive, Patrick Pouyanne, requested a 10-year extension of the LNG project and mentioned compensation for extra costs incurred "due to the force majeure", which it estimated at $4.5 billion.

"TotalEnergies is attempting a new tour de force to obtain ultra-favourable restart conditions," said Daniel Ribeiro, the director of Mozambican NGO Justica Ambiental, in a press release signed by six other organisations, including Friends of the Earth France and Reclaim Finance.

"One of the world's richest companies is holding one of the poorest countries hostage," Ribeiro said.

"The Mozambican government has been pressured to provide public security forces to protect the TotalEnergies project -- and now is being required to pay the costs of the delays. This would weaken Mozambique's economy, worsen living conditions for Mozambicans, and further fuel the insurgency," he said.

More than 6,200 people have been killed in the jihadist insurgency raging in Cabo Delgado since 2017, according to conflict monitoring organisation ACLED.

Attacks by Islamic State-linked jihadists have picked up in recent months, with the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warning last month that the violence was "on track to reach a record high in 2025, with 519 attacks reported by the end of August".

Several gas projects in the area, also involving Italian group ENI and American oil giant ExxonMobil, could "make Mozambique one of the world's top ten (natural gas) producers, contributing 20 percent of African production by 2040", according to a 2024 report by the audit firm Deloitte.

Environmental groups have decried the projects as "climate bombs" that would bring little benefit to Mozambicans, more than 80 percent of whom lived below the poverty line of three dollars per day in 2022, according to the World Bank.