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Perenco bets big on Africa Upstream with Investments in sustainable energy projects

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3 years ago

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Perenco

Perenco CEO Benoît de la Fouchardière provides insight into the company’s ambitious upstream agenda and why it represents the partner of choice for African countries

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, April 12, 2023/APO Group/ — 

Africa’s energy sector is growing rapidly owing to a series of ambitious exploration campaigns undertaken by independent oil and gas explorers. Companies such as Anglo-French independent Perenco continue to make strides towards unlocking the full potential of the oil and gas market. The African Energy Chamber (www.EnergyChamber.org) spoke with Benoît de la Fouchardière, CEO of Perenco (https://apo-opa.info/3MDPRYW) about the company’s upstream agenda and why Perenco represents the partner of choice for African countries.

Perenco recently signed a 20-year contract for the Rio del Rey concession in Cameroon. What is the significance of this contract and how does it align with Perenco’s overall upstream agenda?

Firstly, Rio del Rey (RDR) is the regional hub, surrounded by Dissoni, Bolongo, Moabi, Moudi and soon Bomana. It is also feeding the majority of the production to the COTSA Terminal, the Massongo. We have built this virtuous system of maximizing the synergies between various contracts to support the development of marginal fields which would not otherwise have been economic.

Secondly, RDR is generating its own growth. The fields constituting RDR have already produced over a billion barrels. We believed from the start in 2011 that they could deliver more than they were. We proved it, thanks to a special purpose rig called “the LUG”, developed by the Perenco Group specifically for RDR. It has already drilled 33 wells and production from these represent more than 30% of RDR’s current production. This is a big part of the solution, and we envisage it continuing to drill for years to come.

Perenco represents the largest operator in the country in terms of production. Are there plans to increase production at the Rio del Rey concession? Are there plans to drill more wells?

As I explained, we think we have the appropriate tool to perform fit for purpose infill drilling with the LUG rig. RDR barrels are not easy to find, but they are there. We just needed that versatile and powerful platform rig to produce them. It will at least maintain production at 40,000 barrels per day. It can be boosted if we have exploration success.

How does Perenco work with local communities and authorities to ensure that operations at Rio del Rey are socially responsible and environmentally sustainable?

From the beginning, Perenco has been engaged with the Republic of Cameroon to have a positive impact at local, regional and national levels. At the national level, through revenues generated by our activity, employment and training of young Cameroonians from all regions and all disciplines. Locally we are working with IECD, a Non-Governmental Organization partner to develop micro entrepreneurial initiatives, teaching people to learn how to manage funds and reinvest effectively.

On a global standpoint, we are engaged in a global initiative to remove plastic waste from the countries where we operate – Plastic Free. We are developing a pyrolysis machine at a small scale and another at an industrial scale (to be installed in Cap Lopez in Gabon).  It will clean the plastic from the country and use it to produce diesel in a virtuous circle, also reducing the need for diesel imports.

Perenco has developed a specific know-how that it is now perfecting with the introduction of multiple innovations

What are some of the unique challenges Perenco has encountered in the Rio del Rey basin and what has been done to address them?

The main challenge today is to address the gas flaring issue. The RDR reservoirs have a high gas/oil ratio and cumulated associated gas presents a risk that must be addressed. The issue is the number of locations and the low-pressure nature of the gas, but we have identified solutions to address the challenge. We are working with SNH to deliver the appropriate contractual, technical and economic solution, taking into consideration the country’s needs (gas-to-power, gas-to-industry and LPG) and the current value of gas on the international market. We expect an FID within a year with a fast track first phase right after.

Perenco has been bullish in Africa with the firm securing FID for the Gabon LNG facility as well as acquiring Glencore’s Chadian assets and New Age’s Etinde Asset in Cameroon. Looking ahead, what are Perenco’s plans for expanding exploration in Africa even further? Are there any new markets on the agenda? 

Perenco has developed a specific know-how that it is now perfecting with the introduction of multiple innovations. This know-how fits well with African onshore and shallow water projects, where we have a historical presence and which we can build upon. We know we can deploy our teams easily in other parts of the world, as we did in T&T, Mexico, Brazil and Chad in recent years. 

However, we would always prefer to consolidate our presence in an existing country versus opening up in a new one. Our added value for the country is our ability to create reserves while we produce them. This requires expertise and permanent creativity to fight the natural decline. In the last years, we have added an extensive knowledge of gas to our historical expertise in mature & marginal oil fields. We know that we can replicate in gas what we have learned in oil and bring these ground-breaking solutions to life for the African energy sector.

Why does Perenco represent the partner of choice for African countries looking at developing offshore assets? How does the firm incorporate new technology and innovation into exploration efforts?

Perenco has an entrepreneurial approach. When we initially look at a field, we may not have certainty at that stage how we will produce it. We study it, starting by analyzing all of the available data from the time of exploration and the early development of the field; we share ideas, drawing on our 30 years’ experience; we redevelop in one, two, or three phases; and we connect, explore, or acquire adjacent blocks so as to achieve a virtuous circle where all the fields support each other.

We also have alternative development studies called the ‘oil & gas’ program. As an example, in Gabon on the GANGA field, a field holding 40 million barrels and 1 trillion cubic feet of gas, we have a joint development of oil and gas. By doing so, we are creating value with both products.

The 2023 edition of the African Energy Week conference takes place in Cape Town in October. How does the event serve to advance Perenco’s exploration agenda in Africa and what deals do you hope to sign?

African Energy Week (https://AECWeek.com/) will be an important moment to share with our peers and multi-governmental authorities the specifics of the company and how it adds value in the countries where we operate. As an example, we entered Chad in July 2022.  Eight months later we have already reached 18,000 bpd (from zero at the take over time) and now feed Moundou with a reliable and immediate gas-to-power solution which supports the development of the city.

What makes us different is that when we enter a country it is for the long term; we have a pure, entrepreneurial, approach, not a financial one; and we understand that the countries need to develop themselves and that we must be playing an active part in that development.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of African Energy Chamber.

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Business

Cassava Technologies strengthens Africa’s cloud resilience with Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro designation in Johannesburg

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13 hours ago

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July 20, 2026

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Cassava Technologies

As the first ExpressRoute Metro location in Africa, Johannesburg joins a select group of global technology hubs offering organisations access to a new level of cloud resilience and security

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, July 20, 2026/APO Group/ –Cassava Technologies (www.CassavaTechnologies.com), a global technology company, through its businesses – Africa Data Centres and Liquid C2, has expanded Africa’s cloud resilience capabilities after Africa Data Centres was designated a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro peering location in Johannesburg. This marks a significant milestone for Africa’s digital infrastructure and cloud ecosystem, reinforcing Cassava’s role as a key enabler of secure, resilient, and high-performance digital services across the continent.

 

By leveraging its status as the only provider with an on-net presence in both locations, Liquid C2, Cassava’s cloud and cyber security business, will deliver Secure CloudConnect. This fully managed service combines resilient private cloud connectivity with integrated cyber security solutions, providing organisations with a secure path to Microsoft Azure.

“Being designated a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro peering location is a defining moment for Africa Data Centres as well as for Africa’s digital infrastructure. It reflects growing confidence in the continent’s ability to support the next generation of cloud and AI-driven services while demonstrating the strength of our One Cassava model. By combining the infrastructure capabilities of Africa Data Centres with the cloud and cyber security expertise of Liquid C2, we are providing organisations with the resilient, secure, and trusted digital foundation they need to accelerate innovation and growth,” said Ziaad Suleman, Senior Vice President of Cassava Technologies South Africa and Botswana.

Being designated a Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro peering location is a defining moment for Africa Data Centres as well as for Africa’s digital infrastructure

As the first ExpressRoute Metro location in Africa, Johannesburg joins a select group of global technology hubs offering organisations access to a new level of cloud resilience and security. Africa Data Centres’ JHB1 facility becomes the second peering location within the Johannesburg metro offering a local ExpressRoute Metro capability. ExpressRoute Metro routes a single connection through two peering locations in the same metro, adding built-in redundancy for mission-critical workloads.

This comes as regulators are placing greater emphasis on operational resilience, business continuity, risk management, and data protection.

Liquid C2’s Secure CloudConnect addresses these requirements by helping organisations reduce the risk of disruption, strengthen their security posture, and simplify the management of complex cloud environments, while meeting regulatory and governance expectations. Customers benefit from a single trusted provider while gaining access to infrastructure designed to support business-critical operations.

“South Africa isn’t waiting for the AI era – it’s helping to shape it, and that ambition rests on digital infrastructure the country can trust. With Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Metro now available in Johannesburg, organisations across South Africa gain a more resilient and secure path to the cloud for their most critical workloads,” said Vukani Mngxati, CEO of Microsoft South Africa. “When businesses can build on trusted, resilient foundations, they can move faster, compete on the global stage, and turn South Africa’s digital ambition into real economic impact. We are proud to work with Cassava Technologies to help make that happen.”

This milestone marks a significant step forward for African enterprise digital transformation. By bridging hyper-scale infrastructure with managed cloud security, Cassava Technologies is actively future-proofing businesses across the continent, ensuring they have the speed, agility, and protection required to compete in the global digital economy.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Cassava Technologies.

 

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Master Power Technologies Unveils R50m State-of-the-Art Customer Experience Centre at New Midrand Premises

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13 hours ago

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July 20, 2026

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Master Power Technologies

This milestone marks a significant step in the company’s continued expansion and commitment to advancing Africa’s data centre infrastructure

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, July 20, 2026/APO Group/ –Master Power Technologies (MPT) (https://kva.co.za/), a leading pan-African provider of turnkey data centre and critical power solutions, has unveiled its hi-tech Customer Experience Centre, also home to its new regional headquarters in Midrand.

Master Power Technologies Unveils R50m State-of-the-Art Customer Experience Centre at New Midrand Premises

This milestone marks a significant step in the company’s continued expansion and commitment to advancing Africa’s data centre infrastructure.

Founded in 1999 by electrical engineer Menno Parsons, MPT has grown from its origins as a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) provider into a diversified engineering firm that delivers end-to-end solutions for data centres across Africa and the Middle East. Today, MPT designs, manufactures, and assembles a wide range of products under its flagship brands, SURE and AIVA, tailored to withstand Africa’s demanding operational environments.

The new Midrand facility spans 6 000m2 and will serve as MPT’s African headquarters, housing approximately 200 employees. Strategically located between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the site is positioned close to major data centre hubs, ensuring accessibility for clients and partners.

Hands-on environment

At the heart of the launch is the Customer Experience Centre, a R50 million investment designed to showcase MPT’s engineering capabilities and provide a hands-on environment for customers, partners, and trainees. The centre features advanced test facilities, including a 2 MVA UPS test platform and a 400kW cooling systems test centre, which is the most comprehensive of its kind on the continent.

These facilities enable performance testing to European certification standards, offering clients confidence in the reliability and efficiency of MPT’s solutions, with the company having become the first African business to be officially certified as an Endorser of the European Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centres in 2025.

The Experience Centre represents a new chapter for Master Power Technologies

“The Experience Centre represents a new chapter for Master Power Technologies. It’s about creating a space where customers can engage with our technology, see it in action, and understand the depth of our capabilities,” says MD and Founder of MPT Menno Parsons.

“This centre will be the most impressive UPS and cooling training facility in Africa, allowing our clients to touch, feel, and work with real systems in a way that has never been possible before.”

Commitment to local

The Experience Centre also highlights MPT’s commitment to local engineering and manufacturing. MPT assembles and engineers complete modular data centre and energy centre solutions within Africa. This approach reduces logistical risks, supports local industry, and ensures solutions are tailored to regional requirements.

Beyond technical demonstrations, the centre will serve as a hub for training and collaboration, equipping engineers and clients with practical knowledge to optimise data centre performance.

It also integrates MPT’s proprietary Advanced Infrastructure Visual Analytics (AIVA) monitoring platform, which manages and records metrics across more than 200 data centres in Africa, offering advanced analytics and operational insights.

“Our business has always been about more than just selling equipment. We engineer solutions for Africa, by Africa. This Experience Centre is a testament to that philosophy, which strengthens our ability to train, innovate and deliver world-class infrastructure while remaining rooted in local expertise,” says Parsons.

The launch of the Midrand offices and Experience Centre underscores MPT’s role as a trusted partner in Africa’s rapidly growing data centre sector. With demand for resilient, efficient, and scalable infrastructure on the rise, MPT’s investment positions the company to meet the evolving needs of clients across the continent and beyond.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Master Power Technologies.

 

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Embracing an Intelligent Future: UnionPay Showcases AI Innovation at WAIC 2026

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13 hours ago

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July 20, 2026

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WAIC

Release of Phased Achievements of the National Pilot Base for AI Application (Financial Sector) Held Alongside the Conference

SHANGHAI, CHINA – Media OutReach Newswire – 20 July 2026 – On 17 July, the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) officially opened in Shanghai. UnionPay unveiled three proprietary AI technologies developed for the financial sector at the Shanghai exhibition area: financial transaction time-series foundation model, the Agentic Payment Open Protocol (APOP) framework, and a privacy-preserving large language model inference solution. As the AI era unfolds, the showcase highlights UnionPay’s continued commitment to accelerating the adoption of digital and intelligent technologies.

On 18 July, UnionPay hosted the Release of Phased Achievements of the National Pilot Base for AI Application (Financial Sector) at the UnionPay Center alongside WAIC 2026. The event brought together more than 100 representatives from commercial banks, Chinese and international partners, leading technology companies, academia, and research institutions. During the event, UnionPay released its “1+6+N” AI achievements framework, announced a series of industry partnerships, and launched a joint initiative calling for greater collaboration on the development and governance of the financial industry. These achievements demonstrate the progress of the National AI Application Pilot Base in building an open innovation platform that accelerates AI adoption across the industry.

Dong Junfeng, Chairman of China UnionPay and UnionPay International, attended the event and delivered a keynote speech. He noted that AI is rapidly reshaping the financial industry. Since the National AI Application Pilot Base was launched in 2025, it has delivered a number of meaningful outcomes through close collaboration across the industry. Mr. Dong elaborated on the vision for the development of the base from through three dimensions: sharing, collaborative governance, and mutual benefits. First, by pooling computing resources, data and models on a centralized public platform, the base helps address industry challenges such as the high cost of computing resources and data silos. This lowers barriers to AI adoption across the financial sector. Second, the base has strengthened AI security by building robust safeguards for large language models and applying AI to enhance transaction risk management and cybersecurity. Such efforts are made to support a safer and more resilient financial ecosystem. Third, the base is accelerating the AI adoption across real-world use cases. It has incubated a range of commercial AI solutions spanning agentic payments, credit risk management, consumption promotion and merchant digital transformation, turning technological innovation into tangible business value. Looking ahead, the future of AI + Finance holds enormous potential. UnionPay looks forward to working with partners across industries to build an open, shared, and well-governed financial AI ecosystem that supports the development of new productive forces through technological innovation.

A highlight of the event was the official launch of UnionPay’s “1+6+N” AI achievements framework.

The “1” represents a unified portal—the National AI Application Pilot Base. Built on a “One Portal, Six Centers” structure, it integrates six specialized centers covering models, datasets, applications, talent development, supply-demand matching, and financial services. Together, the platform currently hosts 11 models, 14 datasets, 59 demonstration applications, and 61 service offerings, bringing together 145 core resources in total.

The “6” refers to six independent and controllable capabilities, including computing resources scheduling through a trusted intelligent computing sharing platform, high-quality financial datasets, finance-specific foundation models, AI-powered financial security services, financial AI standards, and a pilot testing sandbox that supports model training and evaluation. Together, these six capabilities form the base’s shared technology foundation, providing ecosystem partners with the core technical infrastructure.

The “N” represents a portfolio of benchmark use cases, standardized AI solutions, and demonstration applications built on this technology foundation. These applications span five key areas—intelligent payments, inclusive finance, consumption growth, risk management and compliance, and operational excellence—building a multi-tier product portfolio serving consumers, merchants, local governments and financial institutions. This accelerates the application of AI capabilities across diverse use cases.

Together, the “1+6+N” framework of the base connects computing power, data, models, and use cases and forms an end-to-end value chain. By addressing common industry challenges—including limited computing resources, data silos and the high cost of AI deployment—it delivers standardized and widely accessible AI capabilities, providing the financial industry with reusable, highly secure and one-stop AI solutions for intelligent transformation. This also reflects UnionPay’s commitment not only to driving its own business growth, but also to enabling the industry through foundational capabilities and reinforcing financial infrastructure for the AI era.

These achievements have already been made available to industry partners and are beginning to create value. For banks, acquirers and other financial institutions, UnionPay’s shared infrastructure enables rapid access to mature financial AI capabilities without the need to build systems from scratch, significantly reducing both technical barriers and implementation costs. For merchants, UnionPay offers AI-powered marketing, digital analytics and intelligent risk management tools to support smarter operations, improve customer engagement and enhance operational efficiency, enabling even small and medium-sized businesses to benefit from AI innovation. For technology companies and other ecosystem partners, the base enables partners to rapidly adapt AI products for financial applications and complete compliance validation, accelerating the commercialization of technological innovations.

The event also featured six rounds of partnership signing ceremonies, covering areas including AI-themed card, cross-border agentic payment ecosystem development, AI-powered operational empowerment for merchants, joint commercialization of pilot base innovations, and broader ecosystem collaboration across the financial industry chain.

Following the signing ceremonies, UnionPay released the Initiative on the Collaborative Development and Governance of AI Applications in Financial Services, with representatives from participating organizations joining the stage to witness its launch. Building on the “1+6+N” framework, the initiative calls on industry stakeholders to collaborate in four areas: First, advancing trusted AI systems that serve the real economy by establishing governance mechanisms for traceable and explainable algorithms while safeguarding data privacy and security; Second, strengthening collaboration among industry, academia, research institutions and users, leveraging the base to jointly advance core technologies and develop independent and secure financial AI infrastructure; Third, promoting openness and inclusiveness by sharing mature AI models, testing services and implementation solutions to reduce the cost of intelligent transformation, particularly for SMEs; Fourth, improving lifecycle governance through tiered risk management, enhanced compliance standards and coordinated risk prevention. The initiative calls on all industry stakeholders to work together by jointly strengthening the foundation, unlocking greater value through shared capabilities, and reinforcing collaborative governance, with the goal of advancing the sound development of AI in the financial sector and driving digital finance through technological innovation.

 

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