There is something of the artist about Carlos Gomes da Silva. The chief executive of Portuguese player Galp Energia, who describes the oil industry as being akin to a “first love”, regularly leaves the executive’s chair for the drummer’s stool or a berth sailing the open ocean.

“My passion is architecture and design. That is what I breathe and what relaxes,” the Porto native says as he talks of a career that has seen him complete a stint at a subsidiary of Danish brewing giant Carlsberg in between more than two decades in oil and gas.

The avid walker and keen sportsman developed a love of the sea at an early age, taking to the waves with his father, who worked in the shipping industry. “He was a captain in the merchant navy, based in the North Sea for many, many decades, and passed to me this love for sailing,” he says.

Open and engaging

An engineer by trade with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science from Porto University and an MBA from ESADE/IEP in Barcelona, Gomes da Silva is more open and engaging than many senior industry executives.

“When I left the company and the industry, I didn’t expect I would return,” Gomes da Silva says of his exit from Galp in 2001 to join Carlsberg company Unicer, returning in 2007, the year after the Lisbon-based player had listed.

“I was so happy that only then I realised it was my first love — not only the company but the industry — because it was where I had been trained as a professional, where I developed myself as a human being, and where I have most of my professional contacts.”

Before his first stint at Galp, Gomes da Silva started out at an electrical engineering company as an analyst and programmer, before joining a legacy company of his current employer, Petrogal, learning the tools of the trade with experience in refining, trading, planning, logistics and strategy. French supermajor Total was one of the shareholders at the time, something that Gomes da Silva says helped hone his skills.

“It was an amazing period in this company where we strengthened our knowledge and learning processes,” he says.

Gomes da Silva was to get plenty of opportunities to work with the Paris-based giant again, not least in Angola, where the companies are partners on Block 32, and where a pair of floating production, storage and offloading units are set to be installed on the Kaombo field — albeit after significant delays.

“It is the only project that is now being developed in Angola — so it is challenging in these times,” he says of the development and the current state of the Angolan oil market, where industry activity, like production and reserves, has been on the decline.

The new government of President Joao Lourenco and a revitalised state player Sonangol have, however, recently struck deals with international players — Total and Italian major Eni among them — to breathe new life into the industry.

“(It is having) decision-making capacity and looking to this as a strategic national issue – if those two things don’t combine, it doesn’t happen,” Gomes da Silva says of the relative stagnation of Angola’s industry in the recent past.

“We are at the edge of guaranteeing that Angola could sustain production, but if Angola will not move fast — and I hope that happens — and see that reforms are required and that as a concessionaire the government will have to put those reforms forward, I think Angola will suffer.”

Although its Angolan assets are core, Brazil and Mozambique are stand-out positions in Galp’s exploration and production portfolio.

The company is one of the partners in Area 4 off Mozambique — including operator Eni and ExxonMobil — where the Coral South floating liquefied natural gas project was sanctioned this year.

Gomes da Silva picks out the East African play and Galp’s non-operating position in the production driver that is Brazil’s pre-salt province as the jewels in the company’s crown.

There are other attractive assets in the E&P portfolio, including acreage in Namibia and Sao Tome & Principe, but the chief executive sees the most mileage in growing the production base through getting more out of what it already has.

“The best investment that we can do is in our own projects,” he says.

“Let me give you an example. We are working in Brazil with recovery factors of about 28%. Our medium to long-term goal is to reach at least 40%. If you go to the mature North Sea fields or even the Campos basin in Brazil, you have over 50% or even 60% of recovery factor.”

Building blocks

Gomes da Silva has been laying the foundations for this expansion at Galp since he took the top seat in 2015, but for the architecture enthusiast, what gives him most pleasure is seeing the team around him put the building blocks of the company’s strategy in place. “If I step back, you might think that you have a fantastic strategy in your head, but strategy only becomes reality when you implement it – when you start to make it happen,” he says.

Calling the beat is a skill he also applies outside of the office, reluctantly revealing that he is an amateur drummer in what he describes as a “garage band”.

“I have some good friends that are professional performers. Once in a while we get together and play music some evenings,” including blues and traditional Portuguese music, fado.