Africa Must lend its Voice towards a Secure and Just Energy Transition – AVEVA Select

UGO AMADI

AVEVA is a Global leader in industrial software , driving industrial transformation with the aid of artificial intelligence and human insight, through its partner AVEVA Select West Africa, has stated that the voice of Africa and other developing countries must be heard to achieve a secure and just energy transition.

The company through its representative and CEO, Dion Govender, stated this in an exclusive interview with newsmen on the sidelines of the just concluded 2023 Nigeria International Energy Summit (NIES), which held in Abuja.

Govender noted that despite the fact that Africa is well endowed with natural resources, the continent lacks  access to sufficient energy.

He noted that, for Africa to achieve a sustainable energy transition, the continent must utilize all its indigenous resources.

CEO, Dion Govender, said: “I’m a firm believer in working towards a sustainable, secure and a just energy transition. But a secure and just transition requires that the voices of Africa and other developing countries around the world must be heard. One of the main reasons for that is simple, in Africa, we are blessed with abundant natural resources, we are in fact energy rich, yet our access to energy is poor.

“We are currently faced with two major crises as a continent, some see it as competing crisis, but we see it as mutually inclusive. They are climate crisis on one hand, and access to energy crisis on the other.

“We must therefore in a bid towards achieving a sustainable energy transition, make the best use of all our indigenous resources, whether they be in the ground or above ground.”

Highlighting the role AVEVA Select West Africa as a software solutions partner is playing its  role to accelerate the energy transition train, Govender stated that the company is helping other companies in Nigeria and West Africa harness and maximize the use of natural resources through the application of modern technologies in synergy with a people-based ecosystem.

“Our role is to help companies harness and maximize the use of all the natural resources using modern technologies, but at the same time, using people that are upskilled and certified, communities and a people-based ecosystem to be able to drive this transition.

“We want to help Nigerian companies to digitally transform and be able to solve some of the biggest challenges that we are facing and at the same time, create digital champions in Nigeria,” he said.

According to Govender, some challenges being tackled in Nigeria by AVEVA Select West Africa are recovering flared gas, reducing carbon emissions, and converting flared gas with the aid of widely available processing technologies, into LPG or CNG, a very clean fuel.

“We work to find a balance by ensuring where Nigeria can utilize and optimize its natural resources whilst reducing carbon emissions through digital transformation. Our technology assists in making sure that every molecule of gas that is saved from emissions and put to commercial use is captured. By this I mean its visibility, the data architecture, the infrastructure, the metering infrastructure, the data aggregation, the data analytics, and importantly, the data visualization of the flow of gas from flat gas to commercially utilized clean CNG.

“We make use of existing infrastructure, ensuring we understand and fully maximize the current situational awareness, deploy our data management infrastructure, ensure that the data that’s coming through is from all the meters as an example from all the instrumentation from the SCADA environment. The DCS environment provides a single version of the truth and gives customers the opportunity to understand the data in the business and how to optimize them.

“This entire process can be visually captured, automated, calibrated, and recorded, so that Nigeria’s oil and gas industry can make a significant impact to the carbon offset programmes,” he buttressed.

Disclosing the digital transformation company’s footprint, Govender said, “With representative offices set up in Abuja, Lagos, and Port Harcourt respectively, we are poised to expand our role by using a simple formula, our own competence plus our community and customers.

“We are building a very large community here in Nigeria, we’re expanding our community. And in fact, we are looking also for local Nigerian partners on the system integration side, to assist and be part of that community. So, we can make use of as much of Nigerian resources as possible.

“Our organization footprint will be based in Abuja but will cover Lagos and recover other parts of Nigeria, at the same time, we will cover other regions and countries within West Africa as well. So, we see Nigeria as a hub, to be able to do pretty much the same thing that we want to do in Nigeria, in other neighboring countries as well,” he stated.

“In building a people-based ecosystem, where technology and customer solutions are also part of, we will get to understand,” Govender said. “why it has not been possible so far and how we can change this mindset of triple ‘F’ challenges that we face, be it; foreign funding, foreign technology, and foreign markets that are exclusively gaining from our digital resources. We can break that cycle and ensure that the ecosystem that we’re building is in Africa for Africa and its partners.”

AVEVA Select West Africa is a proud distributor of AVEVA software, a global leader in industrial software. The company helps to drive digital transformation by managing complex operational processes so that stakeholders can engineer smarter, operate better, and obtain reliable insights and information.

Through Performance Intelligence, AVEVA connects the power of information and artificial intelligence (AI) with human insight, to enable faster and more precise decision making, helping industries to boost operational delivery and sustainability.

In March, Digital Industries announced that it has become an AVEVA Select partner for the East and West Africa regions to deliver AVEVA’s full portfolio of leading-edge industrial software solutions to customers that will help them become more sustainable and profitable.

AVEVA’s cloud-enabled operational data management, combines with software that spans design, engineering and operations, asset performance, monitoring and control solutions delivers proven business value and outcomes to over 20,000 customers worldwide, supported by the largest industrial software ecosystem, including 5,500 partners and 5,700 certified developers.