Page 13 - DMEA Week 10 2020

DMEA FUELS DMEA
Angola hoping to see more filling stations built in eastern regions
ANGOLA
Angola’s Ministry of Mineral Resources and Petroleum has begun drawing up plans for the expansion of the country’s network of retail filling stations.
ANGOLA’S Ministry of Mineral Resources and Petroleum has begun drawing up plans for the expansion of the country’s network of retail fill- ing stations.
The ministry revealed recently that one of its branches, the Regulatory Institute of Petro- leum Products (RIPP), had published a report on the state of the domestic motor fuel sector. The institute drew up the document within the framework of the government’s current national development plan, which covers the period between 2018 and 2022, it said.
In the report, RIPP put the number of oper- ating filling stations in Angola at 1,107 as of June 2019. The government wants to see this number rise to 1,132 by 2022, it said.
Officials in Luanda have not said what steps they might take to facilitate the construction of new stations. But the report noted that the gov- ernment was especially keen to see filling stations built in the country’s eastern regions.
Most of the country’s existing retail fuel out- lets are within Angola’s western coastal regions, especially the densely populated areas in and around the cities of Luanda and Benguela, RIPP stated. By contrast, fuel supplies are harder to find in the eastern regions, and more than 30 municipalities in the sparsely populated east have no filling stations at all, it said.
The biggest player in Angola’s domestic fuel market is the national oil company (NOC) Sonangol, which owns 40.1% of the country’s
filling stations. Pumangol owns another 7.05% of the total, while Sonangalp has 4.7%. Most of the remaining 48.15% are in the hands of small independent operators.
Advice on oil production
In related news, a faculty member of the Cen- tre for Scientific Studies and Research (CEIC) of the Catholic University of Angola in Luanda has urged the government to boost crude oil production.
According to Francisco Paulo, an economist who serves as a researcher at CEIC, Angola’s economy cannot grow unless oil output rises to around 1.6mn barrels per day (bpd). The country is currently producing around 1.4mn bpd, and this is simply not enough to foster economic growth, he was quoted as saying by Lusa.
Angola’s oil sector has been running the risk of decline for some time, owing to a failure to invest in producing fields, Paulo asserted. The country “has not even managed to produce the quota that OPEC allows it to produce,” and budget revenues have suffered accordingly, he commented. The oil industry accounts for 22% of Angola’s GDP and has more potential for growth than any other sector of the economy, he added.
“If our oil exports decrease, then there is an impact on tax revenues, and that could worsen the budget deficit,” he said, according to Lusa.™
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