Subsea services for Angola’s oil and gas sector

Angola

Alberto Figueiredo, CEO of Operatec, talks to The Energy Year about the company’s strategy to further develop training centres, its key projects and priorities, and the challenges in attracting international technology partners to Angola. Operatec is a multidisciplinary service provider for the Angola subsea oil and gas industry.

What is your strategy to further develop Operatec’s training centres?
An important part of our strategy is to continually develop our employees and invest in innovation. That’s why we have continued investing in our training centre. This year, we added more courses and more equipment at our centres in Luanda and Cabinda.
Moreover, we are committed to growing our portfolio from basic safety courses to advanced and complex ones to cater for the growing needs of the Angolan oil and gas and maritime industry. As an example, we have just completed the construction of our IMO STCW-accredited Advanced Fire Fighting yard and lifting operations facilities.
We are planning to inaugurate our new facilities at Futila village in Cabinda to accommodate our training centre with innovative equipment. The centre will have eight classrooms, accommodation for 20 students, a restaurant and offices. In addition to that, our Cabinda training centre is going to have all the necessary equipment for welding training. All this requires investment in assets, people and technology, which we are very committed to.
We are expanding from safety training to more professional and technical training. We started with welding, and we are installing our equipment for electrical, maintenance, instrumentation and mechanical maintenance.
We have also started our investment in Namibia (at Walvis Bay), where we are planning to open a new training centre, which will be inaugurated before the end of 2024. Namibia is now a small market. However, we believe that it will grow very fast and has a lot of potential.

What are the key challenges in attracting more international technology partners to Angola?
To do business here in Angola or Africa is always a challenge. To convince investors from outside to come to Angola is not easy because of the volatility of our economy.
However, the investors need to recognise that, although risks can be high, returns are very high too.
Operatec has been active for more than 28 years, and we are certainly creating a legacy of trust with our local and international partners.

What are the key projects that will keep Operatec busy in 2024?
As training is a continuous process, we will continue to invest in the training and qualification of our staff and consolidate what we have been doing in subsea and finish our investments in the Luanda academy, the new training centre in Cabinda and the new training centre in Namibia.
Moreover, we want to expand the scope of our work in Namibia. We are starting with a training centre, but the goal is to expand into what we do here in Angola, replicating it in Namibia. There are many opportunities here in Angola, but we want to remain focused. Additionally, as part of our expansion strategy, we are looking into extending our presence in Mozambique and replicating our maritime and industrial training initiatives there to service that new and promising energy industry.

What is Operatec’s key strategic priority in the years to come?
We want to become a full-fledged subsea services company. We are a diving company already, but we are investing more in diving equipment, talent and technology.
We have been providing services for Chevron, our main client since the foundation of the company. These services include diving services, repair, maintenance and installation. In 2023, we finished one flexible pipe installation project that was 10 kilometres long. We also obtained new contracts for saturation work. We brought a new saturation diving vessel that is already in action. All this work is cementing our ambitions to become a subsea EPC company soon. We are investing in that, in people, assets and technology.
We want to be known for training, fabrication, subsea maintenance and installation activities. If you look at our strategy, our mission is to identify customers’ needs and present the best solutions, and this is precisely what we have done and will continue to do. Our focus is to keep our employees satisfied to continue supporting our customers’ needs. We will keep innovating to be able to serve our customers in an intelligent way with new technologies and approaches.

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