Global technology company SLB announced it will inaugurate its Integrated Performance Excellence (IPX) Center in Luanda this November during an Angola Oil & Gas (AOG) pre-conference workshop.

Set to cater to the entire lifecycle for oil and gas projects in Angola, the center will facilitate production efficiency while reducing production losses. Additionally, the center aims to maximize economic recovery from well-developed oil and gas fields in Angola while elevating local skills and developing a balanced energy system.

“This center will effectively handle and support local operators and clients [in Luanda], and in the region as well,” stated Rajesh Trivedi, Production Workflows Business Development Manager at SLB Europe and Africa. “We want a collaborative performance center to address and apply technology in local challenges in a collaborative partnership.”

Active in Angola for over 90 years, SLB supports field development as well as exploration across the country’s oil and gas basins. The company launched the Lumi Platform last September, which aims to integrate upstream and midstream applications with a seamless flow of data from AI models. The platform offers a complete lifecycle solution integrated with data management capabilities to empower data-driven decision-making for local operators and clients in Angola’s oil and gas industry.

Meanwhile, SLB has developed a comprehensive dataset covering 40,000km² across Angola’s offshore Kwanza Basin. The company has merged 11 existing datasets to create a singular data package, thereby improving the geological understanding of the acreage. This serves to de-risk exploration ahead of Angola’s 2025 Bid Round – launching in Q1 next year.

According to SLB’s Exploration Lead Europe and Africa Sugandha Tewari, “Through the new dataset, we can now see beyond different blocks and identify issues we may encounter. We have generated coherent data, whereby we can revisit our understanding of the basin. This helps us identify potential leads and prospects across the different countries and blocks. Our regional 3D surveys have allowed us to interpret with much more confidence.”

This data has already supported major projects. According to WesternGeco’s New Ventures Manager Miles Dyton, reprocessed data across the Golfinho field – part of the Kaminho deepwater project – has supported TotalEnergies to proceed with the development of the project.

“It’s important to remember that old data is not bad data. New techniques can be applied to the data we already have,” Dyton explained.

Angola aims to increase national production through various strategies, including heightened exploration and field development. In 2024, the country launched its first-ever marginal fields for exploration and is expected to launch an incremental production program to entice reinvestment in producing assets. SLB’s comprehensive data-set and IPX Center will serve to support these objectives.

The AOG 2024 pre-conference takes place today in Luanda, serving as a prelude to the main program on October 2-3. The pre-conference program features a series of technical workshops and presentations covering various aspects of the oil and gas value chain in Angola.