Africa Oil & Gas: Fifty-four subsidiaries of Angola’s Sonangol to go private

Angolan state oil company Sonangol has submitted to the government a list of 54 companies in the group that are ready to be privatised, the minister of Mining Resources and Oil announced on Friday in Luanda.

Diamantino Azevedo, in a public ceremony held in the Angolan capital on Friday, said that the presentation of the list was the beginning of the Sonangol assets privatisation process, “so that you can focus on core activities, such as the construction of the Lobito and Cabinda refineries and the expansion of the Luanda unit.”

The group of 54 companies accounts for about one third of the companies owned by Sonangol and in a condition to be privatised, and this is “a process that is continuous until a large part of the non-core activities of Sonangol are eliminated, so that the company becomes a real oil operator,” said the minister quoted by state newspaper Jornal de Angola.

The privatisations at Sonangol include an analysis and inventory of all assets that do not fit the company’s main objective, which is oil research and production, and all others will be analysed and, if selected, will be sold.

Azevedo gave estimates that Sonangol’s asset transfer to the National Oil and Gas Agency (ANPG) – announced in August – will take place during the first of three periods of deployment of the new hydrocarbons concessionaire.

The calendar of the ANPG implementation, according to Jornal de Angola, includes a period of preparation for the transition (until December of this year), transition (from January to June 2019) and optimization and transition (from July 2019 to December 2020).

In addition to the planned construction of the refineries in Lobito and Cabinda, the projects include the extension of the Luanda Refinery, the minister said again, having already done so on at least one occasion in August.

The Lobito and Cabinda refineries will be both public and private, with the minister noting, during the forum, that Italian oil company ENI will be the state’s partner in the three projects, including the Luanda Refinery.

The refinery in Cabinda is projected to process from 40,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil per day and the Lobito refinery will process 200,000, the same as the Luanda refinery once its capacity has been expanded. source: macauhub