Eni’s CEO Claudio Descalzi and the Chairman of the Company Giuseppe Zafarana welcomed the President of the Republic of Angola João Lourenço today together with a delegation of ministers from the Angolan government to the “Eni 2050 lab” technology hub, located within the architectural context of the Gazometro in Rome's Ostiense district, to illustrate the technological solutions at the centre of the company's decarbonization strategy.
The meeting took place during the President's State Visit. Today he was accompanied by Adão Francisco Correia De Almeida, Minister of State and Head of Cabinet of the President of the Republic and Téte António, Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Eni 2050 lab is a multifunctional space dedicated to research and innovation that includes a laboratory, a monitoring area and an immersive viewing area for advanced modelling based on Eni's HPC4 and HPC5 supercomputers. Internally, Eni promotes proprietary and breakthrough technologies for decarbonization on the company's three main research platforms: renewables and new energies, decarbonization solutions, and circular and bio products.
During the visit, the most significant results achieved in these areas by Eni's R&D were illustrated, including: the agro-energy development projects and the EcofiningTM technology for obtaining biofuels from biological waste and raw materials that do not compete with food use; scientific collaborations with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), ENEA (National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) and CNR (National Research Council) in fusion energy research; innovations in the field of robotics to automate and digitise environmental monitoring operations and asset integrity; research on new renewables and on energy storage, as well as systems and products in the field of carbon capture, storage and utilisation. Technological innovation is achieved thanks to the synergy between in-house research, advanced engineering skills, expertise and digital tools using the great computing power of Eni's supercomputers.
Eni is a technology-intensive company with its 7 research centres in Italy, over 1,000 researchers and 8,000 patents. Innovation is the tool that Eni makes use of to address the complexity of the challenges posed by the energy transition, with the aim of offering decarbonized solutions, services and products, including through the creation of new business models. Each new result achieved by Eni Research contributes to achieving the Net Zero objective by 2050, with an approach based on the principle of technology neutrality, according to which there is no single solution to achieve the energy transition, but rather a technology mix adaptable to different applications and needs is required.
The meeting also provided an opportunity to highlight Eni's commitment to training for new skills and support for supply chains, from the capacity-building project on agribusiness for institutions to Open-es, a development platform on ESG issues to support suppliers, to Joule, Eni's Business School, which has recently launched specific projects for the development of local start-ups in Kenya and Congo.
Eni's CEO, Claudio Descalzi, said: "We are honoured to have the opportunity to welcome the President of Angola and the Ministers of the Angolan Government today. This visit is a source of great satisfaction for us, as it demonstrates the validity of the alliance model that we have built with various countries where we operate, and of which Angola is one of the most important. In view of the common goal of an energy transition process that is fair and does not neglect the importance of security of supply, we are cooperating with our partners to combine resources, transition technologies and availability of energy sources in order to work together on a development path that respects diversity and leaves no one behind. We have created true alliances based on balance and mutual respect, in which we leave the local populations a large part of the energy we produce together, contribute to local social and economic development, create jobs in the regions, facilitate access to energy and promote diversified initiatives in areas such as health, education, agriculture, and professional and entrepreneurial training. In this way, we create mutual value, because of the prospect of being able to better diversify our energy mixes and supply routes, and to create an abundance of increasingly decarbonized energy for competitiveness and growth."
The setting for the visit was the Gazometro in Rome Ostiense, a complex owned by Eni that is currently being transformed with the aim of creating the first technological innovation district dedicated to new energy chains and open to applied industrial research collaborations connected to the world of research and universities.