Angola: Stopping Production Decline Is “Top Priority” -Avevedo

Africa Oil & Power, the leading investment promotion platform for the African energy sector, has launched a report called ‘Angola COVID-19 Response,’ analyzing the country’s strategy to mitigate the impact of the global pandemic on its energy sector, with a particular focus on its oil and gas upstream sector, which constitutes a fundamental part of Angola’s economic lifeblood.
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“Mitigating the natural decline of production represents one of the largest challenges of the sector and therefore, it is our top priority,” H.E. Diamantino Azevedo, Minister of Mineral Resources, Petroleum and Gas of Angola states in the report.

He describes the Ministry’s upstream strategy as being sustained on four pillars; easing access to new promising acreage, improving geological information and access to it, successfully deploying the General Concession Award Strategy and intensifying exploration activity.

These efforts are being combined with the revision of the country’s marginal fields potential together with a strong drive to develop downstream projects.

H.E. Paulino Jerónimo, President of ANPG, complements these comments by highlighting the government’s collaboration with the oil and gas majors to ensure the continuity of operations, particularly with the license extensions granted to the operators of blocks 14, 15, 17 and 18.

Furthermore, he underlines the important developments achieved in natural gas monetization, particularly when it comes to the “New Gas Consortium, which provides for the development of gas fields in blocks 1, 2 and 3 for the supply of Angola LNG and for other domestic projects, and the Sanha Lean Gas Connection from Cabinda which aims to build a platform for sending gas from the Nemba and Sanha fields to Angola LNG.”

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Besides the extensive analysis of the many strategies and policies deployed by the sector’s regulators, the report also includes interviews with operators Total Angola and Equinor Angola, among other relevant contributions.

“At this pivotal moment in the Angolan global oil and gas industry, where uncertainty dominates the sector, the Angola COVID-19 Response report helps bring clarity to the public discourse on Angola. and It helps understand, as well as value the determined actions taken by the Angolan government authorities to mitigate the impact of this crisis,” says Sergio Pugliese, President of the Africa Energy Chamber for Angola.

The ‘Angola COVID-19 Response’ report is driving the public debate on the oil sector in Angola today and informs both the state of affairs and the decisions to be taken in the future, in the run up to Angola’s biggest annual oil and gas event, the Angola Oil & Gas Conference and Exhibition, organized by Africa Oil & Power, which will take place in Luanda on the 16th and 17th of June 2021.

The first Angola Oil & Gas Conference and Exhibition took place in June 2019 and registered massive success, with the presence of H.E. President João Lourenço, who opened the event, as well as H.E. Diamantino Azevedo and H.E. Paulino Jerónimo. The event also boasted seven governmental delegations and over 1,700 delegates from over 35 different countries.

Five landmark deals were signed during the conference including the agreement for the consortium of the Cabinda refinery, the MoU between the ministry and NFE International for the development of an LNG import terminal, the agreement between ANPG and ExxonMobil for Block 15, the agreement for the creation of Solenova, a joint venture between Sonangol and ENI focusing on renewables, and finally, the signing of the contract for the upgrade of the Luanda Refinery awarded to Kinetics Technology.