"In general, the plans that we had to relaunch the exploration activity were postponed for later years, since the pandemic came to impose some unanticipated variables in which all the players had to readjust their plans", said the director of the ANPG's Strategic Planning office, Alcides Andrade.
The official who spoke at a 'webinar' on "The Cycle of a Petroleum Project", in Luanda, acknowledged that exploratory activities in 2020 "are timid, due to the pandemic, and are relaunched for the years to come".
"It was a little adjusted compared to what was our outlook in 2019," he said, recalling that the challenges of the oil sector had a tonic accent in 2014, the year in which the price of a barrel of oil dropped sharply.
This drop in the price of a barrel of oil, the biggest support for the national economy in 2014, brought several implications for the country's socio-economic condition, including a financial and exchange rate crisis.
For the director of the ANPG's Strategic Planning office, the sharp decline in the price of oil has also "sharpened" the challenges inherent in the oil activity that the sector has been experiencing.
With the pandemic, the situation "got worse" all over the world. "Naturally, from our country's point of view, we are not immune because this is a dynamic sector, which means that these price factors and the impact of the pandemic are global," he added.
"We had established a set of actions and measures aimed at relaunching exploratory activities at the level of our country, we had programmed a set of activities that would be happening this year and progress to higher levels in the coming years, but what the pandemic did was delay, "he lamented.
In order to face the implications of covid-19, last March, ANPG prepared the Integrated Emergency Response Plan (PIRE), which incorporates three axes, namely emergency response plan, business continuity plan and return to business plan. normality.
Regarding the cycle of an oil project, the director of Exploration of ANPG, Adriano Sebastião, said, during this video conference that the phase of oil production begins after the execution of development projects.
The theme of abandonment of oil wells was also touched on by the official, noting that the same occurs both onshore (offshore exploration) and offshore (onshore exploration), whose model can be definitive, temporary or shared well.
As for the operation of marginal fields, Adriano Sebastião said that the concessionaire has been revisiting all marginal fields, interacting with operators and discussing contractual scenarios with them.
"We do not have marginal fields in activity, they are identified and are located in all the basins that we have already explored, they are quantified, categorized by volume and technological solution", he underlined, when questioned by Lusa.
"Among the marginal fields, the one that most recently went into production is the NSINGA field, in Block 0, and is now producing 4,000 barrels of oil per day, this field was not economically able to produce, but with some flexibility it is now to produce, "he concluded.
