  The Penrose process for the decay of electrically charged particles in a
Reissner-Nordstr\"om-anti-de Sitter black hole spacetime is studied. To extract
large quantities of energy one needs to mount a recursive Penrose process where
particles are confined and can bounce back to suffer ever again a decaying
process in the black hole electric ergoregion. In an asymptotically anti-de
Sitter (AdS) spacetime, two situations of confinement are possible. One
situation uses a reflecting mirror at some radius, which obliges the energetic
outgoing particles to return to the decaying point. The other situation uses
the natural AdS property that sends back at some intrinsic returning radius
those outgoing energetic particles. In addition, besides the conservation laws
the decaying process must obey, one has to set conditions at the decaying point
for the particles debris. These conditions restrain the possible scenarios, but
there are still a great number of available scenarios for the decays. Within
these, we choose two scenarios, scenario 1 and scenario 2, that pertain to the
masses and electric charges of the final particles. Thus, in the mirror
situation we find that scenario 1 leads to a black hole energy factory, and
scenario 2 ends in a black hole bomb. In the no mirror situation, i.e., pure
Reissner-Nordstr\"om-AdS, scenario 1 leads again to a black hole energy
factory, but scenario 2 yields no bomb. This happens because the volume in
which the particles are confined increases to infinity along the chain of
decays, leading to a zero value of the extracted energy per unit volume and the
bomb is demined. The whole treatment performed here involves no backreaction on
the black hole mass and electric charge, nevertheless we speculate that the end
state of the recursive process is a Reissner-Nordstr\"om-AdS black hole with
very short hair, i.e., with one particle at rest at some definite radius.
