February 17, 2022
The rate of discovery of new oil and gas reserves in Angola has been exponential in recent years. As of 2020, there are nearly 8.2 billion barrels of proven crude reserves [1] and 13.5 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves [2] in the country. In fact, Angola is the second-largest oil-producing country in sub-Saharan Africa with an output of 1.3 million barrels per day and an estimated natural gas production of 17,904.5 million cubic feet.
With such massive untapped reserves, the global energy industry sees good investment opportunities in Angola. The Angolan government, with an aim to create favorable conditions for internal and external investments, set up the National Agency for Oil, Gas, and Biofuels, or ANPG, in 2019.
ANPG was established to reorganize the energy sector in Angola for ensuring political coordination, promoting sustainable management of oil and gas resources, and creating opportunities for investments in the national oil industry.
ANPG is the National Concessionaire, responsible for regulation, supervision, and promotion of operational activities as well as awarding oil, gas, and biofuel contracts. At present, they are preparing for a new bidding round for both their onshore and offshore blocks. For this, the agency was in search of a secure digital cloud framework and robust subsurface characterization tools that could help them in attracting new investors.
After extensive evaluation and assessment, ANPG has deployed the Geosciences Suite, a DecisionSpace® 365 solution on the iEnergy® hybrid cloud, making it the first-ever iEnergy-DecisionSpace 365 deal in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Geosciences Suite is an innovative, collaborative, and integrated solution that helps provide dynamic end-to-end workflows to enhance subsurface understanding. The solution is powered by iEnergy® hybrid cloud that seamlessly connects assets across public or private clouds. This allowed ANPG to deploy and manage all workflows, critical data, and solutions from the cloud, with round the clock access from anywhere. This helped in boosting productivity across all levels of E&P operations. Further, this robust solution has been deployed as an on-demand Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model that required no upfront capital investment for ANPG.
The fully functional environment for the framework was delivered by Halliburton-Landmark with the help of Microsoft Azure tenant within eight weeks of signing the contract.
Key Components of the Environment
iEnergy hybrid cloud
iEnergy cloud is a dedicated E&P hybrid cloud designed to deploy, integrate, and manage sophisticated petrotechnical applications. Whether assets are in a public or private cloud, they can be connected through iEnergy Stack solution. A comprehensive set of fully managed cloud services helps deliver an excellent customer experience that empowers companies to focus on their core business (see Figure 1).
Benefit for ANPG: With a secure cloud platform serving as a technological foundation, ANPG will be able to take the first step towards digitally transforming the Angolan E&P operations. This will also assist in enhancing the overall productivity and efficiency of Angola's E&P operations, ultimately leading to higher value creation for both ANPG and its investors.
DecisionSpace® 365
DecisionSpace 365 is a robust, cloud-based subscription service for E&P applications. It offers high throughput, low latency, and self-cleaning solutions that help upload and analyze massive streams of data to generate intelligent insights. These solutions leverage our long-standing open architecture and can be used as is or customized for unique E&P workflows.
Benefit for ANPG: The open, modular plug-and-play solutions from DecisionSpace 365 leverage physics-based and computational models including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to deliver data-driven insights. This will help ANPG regulate the oil and gas exploration activities more effectively.
Geosciences Suite
The Geosciences Suite combines innovative technology and a tightly integrated, end-to-end suite of cross-domain workflows. The solution also assists in optimizing the lifecycle management of assets with its integrated workflows and a dynamic sub-surface digital twin.
Benefit for ANPG: Characterizing the subsurface with more clarity in deepwater and ultra-deepwater reserves located offshore Angola, and within the natural gas reservoirs will help ANPG quantify subsurface uncertainty and enhance exploration success.
With ANPG leading the way, we feel that other regulatory bodies in the sub-Saharan Africa will be inspired to adopt cutting-edge digital technologies like cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to optimize and enhance their E&P operations.
References
