Angola has oil reserves and is “not experiencing an energy crisis”

The Association of Companies Providing Services to the Petroleum Industry of Angola (AECIPA) this Wednesday refuted the claim that Angola is experiencing an energy crisis, saying that the country has “many reserves and infrastructure that allow efficient production.”

“At the level of Angola we are not in an energy crisis, we are in a transition process, our oil industry is somewhat mature, there are almost 50 years of oil production,” AECIPA President Braulio de Brito said this Wednesday.

According to an official speaking at the Third Conference on Environment and Development, Angola is producing oil at its maximum capacity and has “large oil reserves.”

“Our infrastructure allows our daily production to be greater than what we see today, work needs to be done to make it happen, so we will continue and then the operators will have the strength to make it happen. We, the suppliers, are here for this purpose,” he emphasized.

According to the AECIPA President, who was one of the speakers at the roundtable on “The Energy Crisis, the Extractive Sector and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” there is still a way to go, but the country does not have an energy crisis like this, he insisted.

He argued that Angola needed to produce more oil efficiently and environmentally so that “indeed,” he noted, the benefits of the revenue generated there could be channeled into the country’s social development.

“And that these revenues be transformed so that Angola can be independent of oil, so that oil becomes another pillar of our economy, not the mainstay of our economy,” he said.

The AECIPA president also pointed to the need to continue to preserve the country’s oil industry as “an engine for the transition to economic diversification”, recognizing, however, that Angola is “not yet ready to live without oil.”

“We really need to continue to strengthen all the good things that the oil industry offers in terms of financial returns, in terms of being able to produce products with less environmental impact, with a very strong environmental footprint,” he stressed.

The leader of the association of service providers in Angola’s oil sector also stressed the importance of aligning the sector with the SDGs so that production is more efficient and has less impact on the environment.

Responding to a question during the debate about the participation of AECIPA members in the technological transformation of the sector, Braulio de Brito said that the sector’s value chain is supported by service providers and they are the engine of the technological transition.

Operators “have a role to play, but on the other side of the value chain we provide services, and we as service providers end up driving the transition to technology transformation,” he said.

“Because we are the ones who really need to use these technologies so that operators can effectively manage and coordinate production processes with less environmental impact,” he concluded.

“The impact of the SDGs on business” was the motto of the III Conference on Environment and Development, held today in Luanda by the magazine Economia & Mercado.

Angola is the second largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa after Nigeria.