Expanded testing and inspection in Angola

Angola

Amandio Tulumba Nangaiafina, sales and business development manager of Bureau Veritas, talks to The Energy Year about the company’s growth expectations for the Angolan market, how its lab services can support the Angolan mining sector and the opportunity the renewable power sector represents for the company. Bureau Veritas provides testing, inspections and certification services.

How do you expect Bureau Veritas to grow in the Angolan market in the coming years?
We expect a healthy level of capital expenditure in the coming years, and our strategy is to leverage on that to grow our business in Angola. We expect our activities in industrial inspection and training certification to ramp up.
Our activities are indeed ramping up, even if we see geostrategic complexities in Europe and oil-price volatility. I believe everybody’s confident in Angola’s track record of performance.
We feel positive about 2023, and I would say for the next four to five years as well. Angola is in a very positive cycle and is working to sustain its oil production levels. It is starting to tap into its gas resources as well. There are upcoming new projects related to new exploration work in the Namibe basin.
We are currently busy with oil and gas offshore industrial inspection, a key activity we perform for some of our oil and gas clients. Industrial inspection involves lifting equipment inspections, which is our speciality. These consist of the integrated inspection and certification of lifting equipment, which is a key differentiator for us.
Asset integrity activities are also very important for us, which include non-destructive testing (NDT), quality assurance and quality control, and project support management, which we can do as a third party or as a second party for technical assistance.

What is the potential of Bureau Veritas’ laboratory services for serving Angola’s mining sector?
We provide quality and quantity (Q&Q) analysis for anything they produce. Commodity prices depend on their quality, so our services can certainly be of use to the mining sector in the same way we work with crude oil and petroleum products. We can accompany this Q&Q process from extraction in the mine to loading and even unloading the vessel.
We are exploring the possibility of investing in a mining-focused laboratory, and we would do that in cooperation with a mining company.

What opportunity do investments in the renewable power sector represent for Bureau Veritas?
Power sector projects are a very important target for us. Our involvement starts from design review and continues through the entire project value chain. For a solar plant, for example, we can confirm the designs and notify the client whether or not the provider is doing well. We can act as a third-party inspection provider by controlling the EPC company developing the project or act as a second party for technical assistance.
The most important value we can bring is our reputation and expertise in renewable energy projects. We have experience and experts in these types of projects across the world.

How strategic are digitalisation and new tools and technologies for your operations in Angola?
Angola is a very mature and advanced market, so a very high level of technology and competency regarding industrial inspection is needed to compete and perform.
For example, our inspection management software is very key for our operations. It’s a tool we are using for all of our clients for lifting inspection and certification. Then we also have smart glasses for remote inspection, as well as drones. We have many pieces of new digital NDT equipment. We invested a lot in inspection equipment.
It is important to understand that we have to combine all these new technologies and digital tools into our services. It’s all about service integration. We are not investing in just one solution.
If we consider drone activity, for instance, we have to identify the right type of drone and see what else needs to be done to perform the inspection. The drone will be useless if we don’t have site competency, that is, visual inspection know-how, knowledge about the equipment and so on. What is important is that we integrate the service along with the drone. This example represents the right approach to digitalisation and new technologies.

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