The United States Ambassador, Mark Stanleyassured this Tuesday that “Vaca Muerta is among the most productive unconventional resources in the world and has the capacity to position Argentina in the next 10 years among the top 20 hydrocarbon exporting countries”.
When participating in the Argentina-Texas Summit Energy event in Neuquén, Stanley stated that “Vaca Muerta will have a profound impact on the country’s macroeconomic situation” and that “there is a growing awareness at the highest levels of the Government about the need to generate the necessary conditions to develop” training in Neuquén.
In this regard, Stanley stated that “policy facilitators they need to encourage investment focusing on free access to foreign currency and capital repatriation; stable regulatory and fiscal framework; free price of gas and oil; pipeline infrastructure improvements.
“Vaca Muerta is the second unconventional gas reserve and the fourth oil reserve in the world. Increasing exports would help Argentina’s balance of payments, provide energy security and provide help to the world” at a time when energy supply became of vital importance due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, said the US official.
On the other hand, Stanley said that this Monday visited the Vaca Muerta area in which the firms work together YPF Y chevron and he was “impressed by the investment, the resources and the dedication of the companies and the workers. I was shocked to see the potential.”
The United States ambassador was one of the main speakers at the event organized by the Argentine-Texan Chamber of Commerce and whose motto was “Unlocking the full potential of Vaca Muerta through the Argentina-United States bilateral association.”
The initiative proposes to discuss the coincidences, opportunities and potentialities of association between Texas -the first shale oil producing state in the world- and Neuquén -province that is going through the first stages of development and exploitation of the large Vaca Muerta reserves.
.@exxonmobil has been in Argentina since 1911 and employs >3,000 Argentines. Today I verified that they are as enthusiastic about the development of Vaca Muerta as with almost any other unconventional project in the company’s history. Great project ???? to help provide energy to the world! pic.twitter.com/xcKD4ewWvl
— Ambassador Marc R. Stanley (@USAmbassadorARG) August 9, 2022
Among the confirmed speakers were the governor of Neuquén, Omar Gutierrez; the Energy officer of the Office of Energy Resources of the Department of State of the USA, Karina Veras; the mayor of the city of Neuquén, Mariano Gaido; and the provincial Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Alexander Monteiro.
Also the CEO of Tecpetrol, Ricardo Markous; the Vice President of Gas, Energy and Business Development of Pan American Energy (PAE), Rodolfo Freyre; and the head for the Americas of the consulting firm S&P Global, Sebastián Borgarello.
At the opening of the event, the president of the Argentine-Texan Chamber stated: “We have the supply, the demand and the technical capacity and experience to exploit Vaca Muerta under competitive conditions and standards worldwide. What is missing are the investments.” .
“Giving adequate signals, investments are executed and resources are made available. An example of this is the recent Gas Plan”, he highlighted.
Argentina has a huge potential to help power the world. Today we visit the facilities of @YPFOficial Y @Chevron in Loma Campana and we learned a lot about the opportunities for growth and joint work in energy matters. pic.twitter.com/vYB3WkPRkY
— Ambassador Marc R. Stanley (@USAmbassadorARG) August 8, 2022
For his part, the Governor of Neuquén, Omar Gutiérrez anticipated that there will be announcements this week that “will leverage and give scalability to the development of Vaca Muerta”, closing this afternoon the presentations of the meeting of the “Chamber of Texas-Argentina Summit Energy”.
The president highlighted “the need to build new consensus and new agreements with the possibility of generating an investment not far from this year’s record in Vaca Muerta of 5,500 million dollars.”
“There is no need to go out looking for investments because we have committed 230 billion dollars to the development of all unconventional concessions for the coming years,” he said.
Gutiérrez added that “today there was broad agreement on the potentiality of Vaca Muerta for what we have done so far and if we had not done it we would not have this confidence and this openness going forward.”
He also asked “to have no doubts that there is no one who opposes the development of Vaca Muerta” and in that framework he asked “the two national political projects (government and opposition) that have competence in the development of Vaca Muerta because they set part of conditions, agree and sign it and discuss other issues in the next election, but not these”.
“In Vaca Muerta we are risking the future of the country and the conditions are the same for the development of lithium and these are not layoff telegrams but more work, more SMEs and more investments,” he said.
