Horacio Marín is the president and chief executive officer of YPF, Argentina’s largest energy company. A chemical engineer who graduated from the National University of La Plata and completed postgraduate studies in the United States, he has led the company since late 2023 after nearly four decades in the oil and gas industry. Under his management, the company has just announced the best quarter in its history. But when asked to assess the results, he does not begin with the numbers.
“Above all, because of the passion of the people,” he replies. He explains that the most profound change was not technical but strategic: setting a goal that goes beyond the company itself, that of enabling Argentina to export more than 30 billion dollars in energy. “I did not realise that a national objective would be so powerful,” he admits. He now projects that the figure could approach 50 billion dollars by 2031, and that YPF will become the country’s largest exporter, across all industries, within the next decade.
Why will Argentina not become like Norway?
It is a comparison Marín hears frequently and dismisses with an engineer’s precision. Saudi Arabia produces ten million barrels per day; Argentina, he estimates, could reach between one and a half and two million. Norway is not a useful model either: it has five million inhabitants and consumes only a small portion of what it produces. “We have almost ten times the population,” he points out.
There is another structural difference. In Norway, the resources and the revenues they generate are channelled into a sovereign wealth fund controlled by the national government. In Argentina, since the 1994 constitutional reform, the resources belong to the provinces. That fact, he argues, makes the Norwegian model impossible to replicate.
What, then, should Argentina be compared with? With itself. Marín believes that, by the 2030s and 2040s, Vaca Muerta’s oil and gas will operate as “the second engine of the Argentine aircraft,” alongside agribusiness.
The bottleneck and the pipeline that removes it
There is a paradox he likes to explain. Argentina reached its all-time oil production record only last year, but the previous peak had occurred in 1998. How can that be explained? At that time, production came from five different basins, which gradually matured and declined. “It is like a glass of water: once I have finished drinking it, no matter how much more you ask for, there is none left.”
Vaca Muerta emerged as something new and without infrastructure. That is why the project led by YPF that Marín considers a milestone is not an oilfield but a pipeline: Vaca Muerta Sur, the first energy infrastructure investment in the country financed entirely by private companies. Bringing together companies that had spent twenty years competing for market share was not easy. “It was not simple. It had never been done in Argentina.”
The calculation that follows explains his enthusiasm: by 2031, two out of every three barrels produced in the country would be available for export.
The project he will not see completed
The other half of the equation is liquefied natural gas. An initial scheme, developed with international partners, will allow the export of around 2.5 billion dollars annually for twenty years, with Germany as the first destination. But the larger project is another one: together with Italy’s Eni and the United Arab Emirates’ ADNOC, YPF is pursuing an investment of approximately 24 billion dollars that will require the largest project finance operation in Latin American history.
The scale of the undertaking is easier to understand through its physical infrastructure. A 48-inch gas pipeline—more than two metres in diameter—from Vaca Muerta to Río Negro. A multi-product pipeline. And a fluid separation plant covering around 200 hectares, equivalent to 70% of the La Plata refinery.
And what does someone who does not own YPF shares gain from it? Marín answers with two things: jobs and affordable energy. On the first point, he recalls that a gas field he developed at his previous company—“one eighth of what we are going to do now”—involved one thousand small and medium-sized businesses, most of them from Greater Rosario and the Buenos Aires metropolitan area. On the second, he explains that the gas associated with oil production will remain within the domestic market, which, he argues, will put downward pressure on prices.
Marín knows that he will not see the end of that story. His term, he says, will conclude in 2031, and he has already identified four vice-presidents who could succeed him. The obvious question is why he would embark on a project whose full results will only arrive in 2045. His answer is almost a definition of his method: “If you want to work only for the short term, you achieve nothing.” He adds, with humour, that when a successor eventually sits down to present the results, the only thing he hopes is that they will speak well of him.
