Sonangol Hires E&P Chief from Exxon

Angola’s state-owned oil firm Sonangol has appointed Ivan Almeida as its new head of exploration and production.

He has held chief of upstream operations positions at ExxonMobil in Brazil and Angola.

His appointment, announced September 28, is in line with Sonangol’s new restructuring strategy launched April 2016 to bring in more external expertise. Almeida is a geosciences graduate of Indiana University in the US and secured a masters with honours at the Agostinho Neto University in Luanda. During his 18 years with Exxon, principally in Angola, he has assisted as a geologist in around a dozen other countries including Nigeria, Norway and Australia, as well as Mozambique where the US supermajor has offshore gas exploration acreage.

Sonangol said its new recruit should better enable it to meet its main objectives of  increasing oil and gas outputs, gaining more market share, and thus cushioning the Angolan economy from the negative impact of lower oil prices since 2014. It also announced the appointment of Emidio Pinheiro, at the head of its commercial division, and Susana Almeida Brandao, as head of its legal department.

Almedia, who was born in the Angolan capital Luanda, is not the first top level Exxon alumnus in Africa. Emmanuel Kachikwu, a former executive vice chairman and general counsel of ExxonMobil in Africa and later group general manager of Nigerian state NNPC, has been Nigeria’s minister of petroleum resources since mid-2015 and remains NNPC board chairman.

Olivier de Souza