Among the angolans is Jorge Ferreira, coordinator of the project, who considered that the start-up of the refinery will "guarantee demand" in that province as well as reduce import costs.
"This refinery will immediately, after its entry into operation, guarantee the demand of the province of Cabinda, reducing the costs of transporting diesel to the province of Cabinda", he began by saying, in statements to the Public Television of Angola (TPA).
The coordinator also admitted that the infrastructure "will allow the export of products, balancing what is the trade balance between imports and exports of crude and refined products to the country and bring countless advantages from the point of view of adding value to the entire complete oil and gas chain".
The director of engineering and products of the refining and petrochemical business unit, Nimbo Virgílio – another of the national engineers involved in the project – spoke about the obstacles faced during the first stage of the project and was happy to be part of the team.
"It's a joy that the person sometimes can't even explain. We started with this project in 2019 and we would really like that at that stage" we had "more dynamics and, at this moment, we would already have the refinery there in Cabinda, but the result of what was the pandemic, we had some restrictions, we had no way of following up the work we wanted here in Houston, however we had dedicated work in Cabinda. We are based in Luanda, but we have been permanently in Cabinda for the other part of the project", he said, quoted by TPA .
The team also includes the Angolans Luís Aguiar, civil engineer, and António Vemba, process engineer.
Regarding the creation of jobs, one of those responsible in statements to TPA explained that in the first phase they have "scheduled 2000 people to be employed", where they will have "1600 indirect jobs and 400 direct".
"In the second phase we will have another 1,500, where we will have about 300 direct and the rest indirect. Looking at the first phase, we have two types of recruitment, there is a recruitment for the Odebrecht company, a construction company, and another recruitment for the jobs refinery operators. As of this month we will take a substantial step in recruitment, we will recruit engineers, human resources, these will have a training period of five to six months and will be the direct jobs, they will operate the refinery", he added.
