Angola attaches a great importance to research and development in its oil and gas activities. This was noticed by the participants at the first meeting of the Forum of Directors of Research, Development and Innovation Centers of APPO member countries, held last week in Luanda, Angola.
The series of visits to research and development centers in Angola was held on Wednesday, April 17, 2024 in the city of Luanda. This activity was organized as a prelude to the inaugural meeting of the Forum of Directors of Research, Development, and Innovation Centers of APPO Member Countries, held on 18 and 19 April 2024 in Luanda. The delegation, composed of representatives of Member Countries, visited the Sonangol Refinery, the Central Laboratory and the laboratories of the Higher Polytechnic Institute of Technology and Sciences. At each stage, the research and development facilities and mechanisms were presented to visitors, who were very curious to understand the different processes put in place.
Sonangol’s central refinery and laboratory in Luanda
Sonangol is a national company whose mission is to exploit and produce oil and natural gas in Angola. This group is the concessionaire of offshore and onshore oil reserves in the country. It accounts for nearly a third of the country’s GDP and vertically integrates many subsidiaries. The visit to its refinery in Luanda allowed the various delegations to discover, first, the facilities of the refinery. In a second phase, the laboratories of this refinery were presented to the participants. These facilities are used to analyze solid products such as rocks and liquid products such as oil and water. Gaseous products such as natural gas and air are also analyzed on site. After the Luanda refinery, the participants went to a structure dedicated solely to research, the Sonangol Central Laboratory. Also located in Luanda, this center conducts upstream, downstream and midstream studies on the industry. Sonangol’s technicians are working in collaboration with those of SLB, which is Angola’s technical partner on this project. For almost an hour of time, the participants, divided into two groups, visited the research laboratories in detail.
The Higher Polytechnic Institute of Technology and Sciences
The visits ended with the laboratories of the Higher Polytechnic Institute of Technology and Sciences. It is a real incubation center, which offers several training courses, including training specific to the oil and gas field. This institute has many laboratories dedicated to research. The research is didactic in nature, even if the work also responds to requests for services from clients outside the institute. At each stage, the Secretary General praised the quality of the facilities. He also inquired about the degree of openness of the various centers to incubators in other African countries. He did not fail to insist on the need for the various research and development centers to join forces with other structures, in order to strengthen their intervention capacities, because, he stressed, no African country can meet alone the challenge of research and development at the service of industry, at a time when the so-called developed countries are withdrawing from the field of hydrocarbons in Africa. The following member countries were represented during this site visit: Algeria, Chad, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, South Africa and, of course, Angola. The guests of H.E. President João Lourenço’s country left very satisfied and edified by the things they saw and heard.
