Luís BARROSO
General Manager
PAENAL

Angola’s Paenal yard prepares for the future

Angola

Luís Barroso, general manager of Porto Amboim Estaleiros Navais (Paenal), talks to The Energy Year about the company’s strategy for adapting to a changing market, such as decommissioning offshore structures and developing renewable energy, and the competitive advantages it offers to clients and partners.

What is the first step in the yard’s regeneration and diversification strategy?
We want our diversification vision to become a reality in the near future, and fast. At this stage Paenal is still a construction yard, supporting the offshore oil and gas industry. But we are preparing ourselves for the future with complementary scopes of work, starting with decommissioning of offshore structures.
The demand for this activity will start at a slow pace because there aren’t so many units at the end of their lifecycle yet. However, Angola has plenty of mature fields that will start to undergo plug and abandonment process soon. This, coupled with global energy transition trends, will increase the demand for decommissioning activities.
With the support of the  

What steps are you taking today to enable these changes?
While maintaining our scope of work in supporting oil and gas, because gas will be the transition fuel for this process, we are already starting to transform Paenal into a shipyard to perform ship maintenance and repairs. We are looking into building some vessels here too.
This is a time when we need to invest in the company in order to prepare it for the future. Having the support from the shareholders, and from the governmental entities, is very important to give us the guarantee that everything is going to be executed as we wish.
What is the significance of Paenal’s fabrication yard for Angolan local content?
Paenal has been a flagship company in Angola. We received the first FPSOs that came to the country. We achieved very good results with those projects. We were given a high evaluation not only regarding the quality of our facilities, but also for our staff and technicians.
Since its creation in 2007, Paenal has become one of the most modern yards in Africa, with a solid reputation in the construction of complex projects for the major oil and gas operators and capable of constructing about 10,000 tonnes per year of topsides/modules, wellhead platforms, subsea equipment and heavy structural steel.
One of our most recent projects is the engineering, procurement, fabrication, hydro-testing, painting, thermal insulation and load out of six 12-inch production spools of approximately 80 metres in length to replace the existing spools in the P303 & 304 Block 17 Dalia field for TotalEnergies.

How would all these changes affect the socioeconomic development of Porto Amboim?
We are keeping our workforce mobilised. In the future, some of them will maintain their normal role, as some activities such as procurement and QA/QC will remain the same. But we will have to adapt to new realities. Welders for construction yards, for instance, will have to be re-trained for these new activities. We will reinforce our labour with new employees, and of course provide them training to be well adapted to the positions that we will need in the future.
Paenal is moving forward, and our local community will feel this positive impact in the local economy. If we double or triple the number of employees, naturally, the impact on the secondary economy of Port Amboim will be huge in terms of the hotels, the restaurants, the stores… everything.

How is the company working to reduce its carbon footprint?
We are also installing solar panels on the roofs of our buildings and trying to take the greenest approach to the process by reducing our reliance on thermal power. In a bid to halt our use of diesel generators, we already have the support and confirmation from the Cuanza Sul provincial government to extend the provincial transmission grid into the yard.

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