Angola’s local players expand in the upstream

Angola

Ulanga Gaspar Martins, chairman of Poliedro, talks to The Energy Year about dynamics local operators face in Angola’s upstream and the company’s strategy for navigating them, as well as its plans for activity in the mining sector. Poliedro is an oil and gas company with a presence in Angola’s E&P, mining, fuel retail and logistics sectors.

This interview is featured in The Energy Year Angola 2025

What are the core elements of Poliedro’s business strategy for the coming years?
In 2024, we completed 20 years in the market, and we are in the process of reviewing our business plan. In the coming years, we are going to focus more on developing our upstream business and reducing our focus on the downstream.
We decided to cut by half the objectives that we had in setting up the fuel distribution network.
For the upstream business, we decided that for the next five years, the objective is to enter at least five blocks and become a full-fledged operator by 2028-2029. Today, we are creating the conditions for this to happen as we already participated in two bids to acquire stakes in two oil blocks. Under this strategy, our focus continues to be the same: productive mature fields, preferably operated by a local company and an IOC.
In the next two years, we will be focusing on capitalising on these opportunities, either by actively participating in bids or by having bilateral discussions with other players and stakeholders. When we look at the market, there are still a lot of opportunities. In the 2025-2026 timeframe, we will be very much focused on trying to execute our plans to expand our upstream business.

What characteristics of marginal and mature fields make them an interesting investment for local operators such as Poliedro?
Today, there are several benefits of entering marginal fields since the government has introduced better fiscal terms for exploring them. And these, of course, contribute to the operational viability for domestic operators. We now have the Incremental Production (IP) legislation, creating a new special legal and tax framework to promote investments on mature blocks and other undeveloped areas.
It is a positive development because the more attractive the fiscal terms, the easier it is for local companies to acquire funding. For us it is critical that the government will continue to have flexibility in negotiating terms for operators to acquire funding to bring these marginal fields on stream.
The new fiscal terms allow us to participate in tenders, secure blocks and start developing these fields. In turn, this allows us to stabilise or even increase our production. Our strategy is more about farming into the fields.

What is your assessment of the need for local operators to collaborate on the acquisition of blocks?
Today, it is difficult to find a single local company able to raise, by itself, the required finance to acquire blocks. They also can’t develop everything, and nobody would want to develop some of these fields alone. Now, it’s more a matter of sharing risks and opportunities. The trend of having some of the independent companies from the continent, such as Oando, coming to Angola is a good thing.
We are hoping that it will be a matter of collaboration. If everyone were fighting for a tiny number of opportunities, it would be different. It would steer competition. But today, there’s space for everyone.
The ANPG [National Oil, Gas and Biofuels Agency] announced that there will be a bid round for new blocks in 2025 and possibly a second one in the same year. We encourage more companies to enter the market because there are many opportunities for collaboration to be identified and taken advantage of.

What do you think is needed for the banking sector to better support the operations of local operators?
The key phrase is exposure to the oil and gas sector. For a very long time, especially if we look at the local banks, they haven’t been exposed to the sector. Our sector has traditionally been dominated by IOCs who obtain financing from outside and are not dependent on local banks. Even for smaller streams of finance, these companies would rely on external sources of finance.
Now that you have the increasing presence of local players in the sector, local financial institutions must play an important role as part of the ecosystem. And for this to happen we need these banks to be involved in transactions and in some of the acquisition processes.
For instance, in 2024, Etu Energias acquired a 5% stake in Block 32 and 9% in Block 14 from Galp Energia, and there were two local banks participating in the syndication of the transaction. We need to have more of these transactions so that the banks become exposed to them. They will have a learning curve and become comfortable with the risks attached to such operations.

How does the increased investor attention towards Namibia impact your business objectives?
For Poliedro, Namibia has little to no influence on our business objectives because it has a totally different type of assets. It is a frontier market in the exploration phase. If it all goes well, there will be first oil in 2031 or 2032. In contrast, Poliedro focuses on blocks that are already in production today.
One way it might influence us is if IOCs start divesting from some of their assets in Angola to invest in frontier markets such as Namibia and Guyana. If this happens, we can seize the opportunity to enter those blocks. We come from different backgrounds and have different cost structures, so something that might no longer be interesting for an IOC might be interesting for a local company.

What is Poliedro’s strategy for capitalising on the mining sector?
We have embraced the mining sector through restructuring. We’re setting up a new subsidiary dedicated to the sector: Poliedro Mining. We aim to set up the subsidiary by Q3 2025 as well as complete the prospecting and economic studies of the Banje Angola Project diamond mine in which we’re involved today. Our focus in mining is pursuing minerals that have the agriculture sector as an end user.
Today, we’re looking into the possibility of getting a licence to explore limestone, which is quite important for soil enrichment, and phosphates, which would then be used to produce fertilisers. These are the two main areas in which we would want to focus, on top of the diamond project.

What measures are in place to ensure the decarbonisation of your operations?
We are heavily invested in the decarbonisation of our operations. We focus on mature fields, and some of them were developed 10-20 years ago with technologies of that time. At that time, flaring gas was normal. As we are transitioning to become an operator, we’re looking at how we can decarbonise these operations.
For us, this is more critical than trying to showcase a renewable energy initiative because decarbonisation is critical to continuing to attract funding. You can either demonstrate a trend of lowering emissions or risk not being able to secure enough funding to continue to develop some of these marginal fields. So going forward, it is more about how we can monetise the gas that we are already producing and that would otherwise be flared.

Read our latest insights on:

• Angola
• Guyana
• Namibia