Oil Field Calculator is an Angolan company offering customized solutions to project costs for energy and industrial projects. Energy Capital & Power spoke to Silverstre Lombo, CEO of Oil Field Calculator to understand the firm’s technology and services and the impact it has on the Angolan energy sector.
Oilfield Calculator is an Angolan company established to produce cost estimations for the oil and gas industry since 2017. Please tell us more about the inception of your company?
While I was a facility engineer for 19 years, I was creating a ‘calculator’- a system to project infrastructure and estimate their costs. In 2015, I finalized that process and with the finalization, I started estimating the system on actual field projects.
By 2015, the company had matured to the level that we could advance. Then in 2016, I made the first product that could program a language and I used a C++ which is a digital calculator. I programmed this calculator to where it is today and by 2015 we had our first prototype. Then in 2017, we went to all the universities in Angola but they weren’t very receptive, so we decided to focus more on the industry. In the same year, I created OIL FIELD CALCULATOR, LDA. to formalize the sale of the OFC2000 Calculator and create consulting services with this innovative digital tool.
How does the “OFC2000” estimate the cost of the development phase of oil and gas projects in relation to the resources discovered?
The product is unique- we have taken very complex calculations and simplified everything with a mathematical formula. So, why is it unique? Once you get the feel for it, you are able to see the size of the field in terms of barrels, and how many barrels you can recover for the bill. It depends on the type of reservoir and type of field that you are in of course but you can introduce the calculator and then the calculator makes a production profile and also figures out how much you need to invest. It’s able to do this very fast as well.
Variables such as the tonnage of heavy machinery and other metrics must be factored in for costing. Why is this important to successfully plan other aspects that are essential for oil and gas projects?
You are also able to calculate how much weight the entire facility is going to be. For this production capacity that you have for your field, you are able to see how much tonnage you are going to have. You can also see how many wells you will need and quantify the number of barrels for the division. It enables you to benchmark the portions for all the facilities.
What can the Oil Field Calculator provide specifically to the government and operators in the oil and gas sector?
We are able to help the operators gather a unique system that enables them to all communicate in the same language. The software in many companies, like Schlumberger, are not very customized and built for specific fields. What we do is unique because elsewhere you can see all kinds of different numbers changing but with us you get consistency and we are able to customize this for clients. Another thing we are going to do is engineering and standardization which could be key for the standardization for the coming years. You are able to standardize for each individual area and tell the companies the cost.
Is the Oil Field Calculator currently seeking any investment for a new or an existing project in the short-term within the next 24 months?
We are investing here in Houston, in 2021 we opened here a branch to formalize our internationalization. And we believe that the OIL FIELD CALCULATOR as an international Company, has to keep introducing the revolutionary products to the global market. We are not only an oil and gas institution, but we also draw on the experience that we bring from oil and gas to every company that we have in other sectors. That’s why OIL FILED CALCULATOR is a business group. For example, we have a new calculator that we are modernizing that is almost in its finalized stage- it is called ARCHITECTURE7000 and used for projects involving houses and how much their construction will cost. We are also making a calculator for the automobile industry which estimates the building costs for specific models of cars.
The big investments we are making are in terms of trying to convince companies like BP, Exxon, TOTAL, CHEVRON to work with us as one team. This is because if they are using our oil calculator (OFC2000), they can get the benchmark for themselves. They would get a very good cost estimation, not an approximation. In 2018, we went to CHEVRON and made a presentation in the Chicala building and when we made a calculation together, they were able to verify what they had in their database. They recognized that our calculator was a valuable solution in the industry and CHEVRON saw that we were ready to be a consultant which is why we took that step forward.
