O&M leadership in mining and energy

Colombia

Oscar Fernández, president of Confipetrol, talks to The Energy Year about the company’s market position in Colombia and the Andean region, how it has grown nationally and regionally and its services and their unique value. Confipetrol provides a wide range of operations and maintenance services.

What market position has Confipetrol established since inception?
Confipetrol was established in 2007 and is a leading company in Latin America in providing comprehensive O&M solutions. In Colombia we are among the top-three companies that do O&M, and we’re also in the top ranks in the Andean region.
We strive to be the best ally in the provision of O&M services by ensuring, through proper management, the optimisation of the lifecycle of the client’s assets to help them obtain higher margins, better response times and high standards of reliability and equipment availability.
We have sophisticated equipment and highly advanced software that allows us to diagnose and predict the condition of our clients’ critical and high-value assets, ensuring their availability and improving their profit margins. Within the hydrocarbons sector, we specialise in predictive maintenance techniques using AI equipment and asset-management techniques.
We are one of the few companies in the sector that are ahead of the competition in terms of technology. Namely, we use AI while training personnel with virtual reality. This has given us an added value in the market and allowed us to grow substantially.

What strategies has Confipetrol taken to grow nationally and regionally?
We began with small contracts of USD 1.5 million, and in the first two years, we had an annual revenue of USD 8 million. We have been growing substantially over time at a rate of 13-14% yearly for the past 15 years or so. In 2012, we decided to expand by opening a branch in Peru that today accounts for 45% of our revenue and has 3,400 employees.
In 2015, we opened a branch in Bolivia where we currently have around 600 employees and very good sales. We also ventured into Chile, where we are working with the mining sector. This has been a good way of diversifying our revenue beyond energy as well. Our growth plan includes opening up branches in Ecuador and Mexico.
Our growth strategy includes organic and inorganic growth. We started off with organic growth, but we took advantage of the 2016 crisis to acquire Skanska Peru. We see opportunities in crises and grow following a pattern where we expand, consolidate and then look for other opportunities.
The same happened during the pandemic. Despite being a complex period, we had outstanding performance. We were fundamental partners to operators that needed to maintain their productive assets at maximum capacity. In the first four months of the pandemic alone, we won USD 200 million in new contracts.

How do you ensure your clients less downtime and greater efficiency?
In some cases, we monitor assets remotely, in a centralised way. However, we tend to tailor services to the customer’s requirements and desires. We can retrofit plants remotely to extract information and do all the predictions online in order to tell the client what to do without having to stop their equipment.
From our control room, we take the data, and with AI we can get an accurate diagnosis of what might be the issues affecting that asset. We have several data centre sites, but the plan is to have a centralised one.
We structure the O&M procedures, design the techniques and also have the ability to increase the lifecycle of equipment. We are operators and maintainers. We also provide asset management, predictive maintenance, maintenance engineering, plant shutdowns and pre-commissioning. Our teams are top-notch and able to provide diagnoses while equipment is still running.
When equipment stops, we repair it and reassemble it in the most efficient way. Given the fact that critical producing assets cannot simply come to a halt given economic and technical implications, we look for similar components that can function as substitutes. This allows production to continue with minimal stoppage. Instead of waiting 15-20 days for a piece to be repaired, replacing it takes only two days, and time is money.
Customers actually pay us to make sure that their production capacity is always available. To this end, we come up with the most efficient maintenance plans and strategies in which we apply optimised processes with specialised software. We also use root-cause analysis processes and account for equipment downtime and average repair and start-up times. We calculate everything and seek the best solutions possible for our clients.

What type of O&M work do you typically carry out and who are your key clients?
While the production operator extracts the crude oil, we operate customer assets so that these run at full capacity, guaranteeing the operator the functioning of their asset. For example, we operate compressors for the customer, and we’re present 24/7 to make sure they don’t fail.
With generation assets, we make sure generators – for example, thermal machines and turbines – work correctly. We do the same in oil and water treatment and injection plants on site at the oilfield. We operate two-phase and three-phase processing facilities. At one point we were operating almost 600,000 bopd in Colombia, being present in the most important fields.
Some of our most important clients include Ecopetrol, Gran Tierra Energy, Frontera Energy, Cerrejón, Drummond and Enel. We work with Enel in Colombia, Peru and Chile doing network maintenance. In Chile we did the maintenance operations for their thermal plants, while in Peru we did maintenance operations for their hydroelectric plants. For many of these VIP companies, we normally cover assets on a regional basis.

What growth objectives does Confipetrol have in Latin America?
Our growth plan is to expand beyond the Andean region and across Latin America. We are looking at Mexico now as a very promising market. We will be there by the end of 2025, and we are focusing not only on the hydrocarbons sector but also on the mining industry, which is very important there.
Today 45% of Confipetrol’s revenue comes from the mining industry. Another 45% comes from hydrocarbons. Another 10% is between energy, facility management and normal industry. Our objective is to continue growing and exploring new avenues.
In the short term, we are looking at the offshore, which means offering integrated services including offshore platform construction, offshore drilling and the laying of subsea pipelines. Our aim is to be a leader in the offshore sector. The offshore potential in Colombia and in the region is huge, so we will be capturing this market very soon.

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