Horacio Turri is vice president and executive director of Exploration and Production (E&P) at Pampa Energía, and one of the technical voices most often heard when the future of Vaca Muerta is discussed. An industrial engineer who graduated from the Buenos Aires Institute of Technology (ITBA), born on March 19, 1961, he leads the oil and gas business of one of the country’s largest energy companies.
His career in the sector began in the mid-1980s and included field work, investment project evaluation and the leadership of power generation companies before he arrived at Pampa. That itinerary gave him a view of the industry that connects the well with the balance sheet, and a seat on the company’s board as alternate director.
From his current role, he repeats the same idea in every forum: Vaca Muerta’s potential is now running into a surface-level limit. There are not enough pipelines to move Neuquén’s gas and oil toward export markets, and that is where the great challenge of the coming years lies.
From the well to the board: Turri’s career in energy
Between 1985 and 1987, shortly after graduating, Turri worked at Schlumberger Wireline, the oilfield services company. He later spent three years at Arthur Andersen & Co. and, between 1990 and 1992, evaluated investment projects in oil, gas and electricity at the grain company SACEIF Louis Dreyfus. That first stage combined field operations with the financial analysis of projects.
The leap into leadership came in the power sector. Turri was chief executive officer of Central Puerto S.A., Hidroeléctrica Piedra del Águila and Gener Argentina S.A., three relevant players in local generation. With that experience behind him, he landed at Pampa Energía, where he is now responsible for Exploration and Production, the segment that supports the company’s recent growth, with operations in eleven production areas and the co-control of Transportadora de Gas del Sur (TGS).
The future of Vaca Muerta according to Turri
“The trains of the nineteenth century are today’s gas pipelines and oil pipelines,” Turri summarized before the audience at AOG Patagonia, in Neuquén. The image helps him explain his diagnosis: just as the railroad turned the Pampas into the world’s breadbasket, the Neuquén Basin now needs its own tracks — dedicated pipelines, treatment plants and LNG terminals — to send production abroad. That is where his call for an aggressive infrastructure policy comes from.
In that race, Pampa is among the six companies pushing the Vaca Muerta Sur oil pipeline. Together with Oldelval’s Duplicar project, that system aims to enable evacuation capacity of 800,000 barrels for export by the end of 2027. It is the project that, in his view, defines how much production will be able to grow.
The ground where that bet is being played is called Rincón de Aranda. In Vaca Muerta’s oil window, Pampa operates the block with its own drilling rigs and projects an increase from about 18,000 barrels per day by the end of 2025 to around 45,000 in 2027. To support that pace, the company is building a central treatment plant capable of processing 45,000 barrels per day, a project of nearly US$426 million registered under the Incentive Regime for Large Investments (RIGI).
Gas is the other pillar. Under his management, Pampa reached a record 17.4 million cubic meters per day in the second quarter of 2025, driven by El Mangrullo and Sierra Chata, which keep it as the country’s third-largest producer. The company even began firm exports to Chile’s Biobío region. And Turri estimates that gas projects could add nearly 120 million cubic meters per day to Vaca Muerta, a volume that only works if it finds an outlet beyond Argentina’s borders.
Turri has no illusions about the power to set conditions. In the markets Pampa aspires to reach, Argentina arrives as a price taker, and that reality defines the formula: lower costs and gain competitiveness so that Neuquén’s barrel and cubic meter can compete on equal terms with global supply. “The market is the world,” he often repeats to describe the scale of the challenge. The 2027 picture, with the evacuation system expanded and Rincón de Aranda in full operation, will be the test of that bet.
