What we talk about when we talk about Vaca Muerta

“There are moments when a territory stops being explained by what it has and starts being defined by what it can sustain. We believe Vaca Muerta is going through exactly that moment.”

This Observatory is born from a simple but demanding conviction: to accompany a process of this magnitude, you first have to understand it in depth. We are not looking to amplify noise or build an empty narrative. We are looking to observe, analyse and understand a complex system, with the responsibility its impact implies for the economy, for organisations and for people’s lives.

From Sur Lab — our strategy, creativity and innovation laboratory — we drive this space as a working unit dedicated to reading the ecosystem from within. In dialogue with those who operate, decide, invest, manage and make things happen every day. Because we understand that at this stage, communication stops being discourse and becomes evidence: coherence between what is said, what is done and what can actually be sustained.

This first report opens a series of five bimonthly X-rays. We are not looking to close an interpretation but to open a framework for reading it. To observe what the system says, what it lives, what it shows and what it effectively validates.

We believe this Observatory can become something valuable if it manages to sustain an honest conversation with the ecosystem. To make visible what works, what constrains, and what still needs to be developed.

Our purpose is to contribute to a better understanding of Vaca Muerta as a system. Because understanding in greater depth is also a concrete way of contributing to its development.

This is only the beginning.

Vaca Muerta is not only rock

“Nobody asks about the rock, they ask about what sits above it.”

The phrase, repeated by different actors in the ecosystem, captures better than any other the moment Vaca Muerta is going through.

Because if the first stage of the conversation was dominated by the geological power of the resource, the discussion has now shifted to everything that enables — or constrains — its scale: predictability, rules, infrastructure, training, legitimacy, real capacity and trust.

But another phrase also appeared, less epic and more uncomfortable, working as a counterpoint: “more of the same.”

That is how Vaca Muerta’s boom is sometimes defined too, far from institutional discourse and closer to the daily effort of sustaining real operations, certifications, structure, employment and financial backing in a deeply asymmetric system.

A central tension lives between those two phrases.

For some, Vaca Muerta represents a historic blessing, a productive locomotive capable of reordering Argentina’s energy matrix, substituting imports, generating foreign currency and projecting the country onto a new geopolitical scale.

For others, it remains a new version of a familiar promise: rent concentration, timelines that stretch, growing demands on SMEs and an unequal distribution of both risks and benefits.

Both things coexist. And that coexistence does not weaken the phenomenon: it makes it more real.

The starting point

At our Observatory we start from a conviction: Vaca Muerta can no longer be read only as an energy asset.

Its evolution turned it into something more complex and more decisive: a basin that reorganises territory, expectations, value chains, professional trajectories, organisational cultures and forms of public representation.

The scale reached by production, the export leap, pipeline expansion, pressure on cities, the institutionalisation of technical training and the multiplication of actors now orbiting the basin show that we are no longer talking only about shale.

We are talking about a system that affects the provinces, Argentine macroeconomics and the country’s position in the global energy conversation.

In the 114 years since Vaca Muerta was “discovered”, an estimated USD 80 billion has been invested. In 2025 alone investment approached USD 10 billion, while committed unconventional concessions exceed USD 215 billion going forward.

The discussion is no longer whether Vaca Muerta exists. The discussion is how its next stage gets managed.

Because Vaca Muerta is a locomotive, an opportunity, a beacon, a treasure, an engine and a tension. But above all it remains a basin located in Patagonia — mostly in Neuquén, also in Río Negro, Mendoza and La Pampa — in Argentina, in South America, within a global economy crossed by new energy, technological and geopolitical disputes.

And also a system where the most important question no longer lies beneath the rock. It sits above it.

Moderating expectations and discourse

One of the most frequent risks when discussing Vaca Muerta is loading onto the basin a promise of total salvation. As if on its own it could solve the structural problems of the Argentine economy.

As economist Juan Carlos Hallak explained at Vaca Muerta Insights 2026: “if we load every idle wagon of the Argentine economy onto Vaca Muerta, the locomotive won’t start.”

To illustrate, he detailed: “Norway exports USD 30,000 per capita per year in natural resources, mainly oil. Australia USD 13,000 per capita, above all from mining. Canada adds USD 7,000. Chile, USD 3,600. Argentina, however, exports natural-resource-based goods worth USD 1,200 per capita.”

“With the USD 40 billion Vaca Muerta could export in the future, Argentina would move to per capita exports of USD 2,000. Even doubling the maximum exports estimated for the next decade, the calculation gives us USD 3,000 per capita.”

The figure does not reduce the basin’s strategic importance. On the contrary: it puts it in scale.

Its power is extraordinary, but no serious narrative should load onto Vaca Muerta alone the entirety of a country’s development expectations. Understanding that does not weaken its value. It makes it more real. And more responsible.

Methodological close

This Observatory is only beginning to peel back the basin’s layers.

Each bimonthly issue will let us observe how patterns of legitimacy, chained constraints, strategic communication, representation, training and the architecture of trust evolve within the ecosystem.

This first report was an initial X-ray. A starting point. A way of ordering questions before closing answers. Because in complex systems, understanding well tends to be more valuable than opining fast.

The next layer is already in motion: the run-up to AOG Patagonia 2026. The fair begins long before the lights come on at the venue.

That is where you start to see who is growing. Who is improvising. And who really understands how legitimacy is played in Vaca Muerta.