In June, Argentina produced 914,900 barrels of oil a day. That is a national record, it is up from 779,000 barrels a day twelve months earlier, and it puts the country within 85,100 barrels of the million-barrel mark — a threshold no one in this business was seriously discussing five years ago. We have said before that Vaca Muerta sits at the center of the post-Hormuz energy realignment. The June numbers, and the $19.6 billion in energy and mining projects now under formal construction behind them, are the confirmation, not the thesis.
We hold direct positions in Argentine energy assets through the Terra Chachahuen joint venture. We are not reading this data as spectators.
The Number That Matters: 70%
Vaca Muerta's oil production hit 633,946 barrels a day in June, up 33% year over year. Shale now accounts for 70% of everything Argentina pumps. The formation has 4,672 active wells and added 42 new ones in the month alone. In gas, Vaca Muerta produced 97.8 million cubic meters a day, up 10.2%.
Zoom out further and the acceleration gets starker. In the last twelve months, Vaca Muerta added 157,486 barrels a day of production — more than the entire formation produced in 2018. Since then, non-conventional oil output has multiplied nearly twelvefold, at an average annual growth rate of 36%. This is not a gradual ramp. It is a formation that went from a bet to a load-bearing pillar of national output in under a decade.
The Ranking Is Being Rewritten
YPF still leads with 265,600 barrels a day and roughly 27% of the market, but its growth is uneven — total volume is up only 2.6%, weighed down by the sale of mature fields, even as its shale oil output jumped 44% to 215,000 barrels a day. That split matters: the state-linked incumbent is winding down the old fields and doubling down on the new ones.
Vista Energy is the more interesting story. It moved into second place at 132,900 barrels a day, up 48% year over year, after absorbing assets acquired from Petronas and Equinor — a direct transfer of international operator confidence into a domestic growth vehicle. Pan American Energy holds third at 94,800 barrels a day but is the only name in the top five actually shrinking, down 8.1%. Chevron is fourth, up 25% to 68,900 barrels a day. And Pluspetrol has pushed into the top five for the first time, up 46.6%, on the back of La Calera and a block that used to belong to ExxonMobil.
Read as a group, the ranking tells you where the capital is rotating: away from mature conventional assets and legacy operators managing decline, toward the operators — international and domestic — willing to put fresh capital into the shale buildout.
Exports Are Starting to Show It
June fuel and energy exports reached $1.406 billion, up 31.1% year over year, with a monthly energy-sector surplus of $612 million. For the first half of 2026, energy exports totaled $7.619 billion. Crude export revenue alone hit $918 million in June, up 24% year over year — even though the volume exported actually fell 22%, because Brent averaged $85.40 a barrel in June versus $71.40 a year earlier. Price, not volume, did the work.
That price action was not calm. Brent bottomed at $68.53 on July 2, spiked to $105.32 on July 23 as the Strait of Hormuz tensions flared back up after a mid-June truce, then eased again after a new U.S.–Iran truce on July 27. BBVA Research frames three forward scenarios: a gradual resolution puts Brent at $75–90, persistent tension at $90–100, and a severe Hormuz disruption above $120. Argentina benefits from all three, because none of them require Vaca Muerta's supply chain to run through the Gulf.
"Argentina has abundant resources. What determines how much of that translates into production, domestic supply, and export capacity is whether the logistics and transport bottleneck gets resolved." — BBVA Research
The Constraint Isn't Underground Anymore
Every serious report on Vaca Muerta now says the same thing: the limiting factor stopped being geology or drilling technique years ago. It is pipe, compression, and port capacity. Argentina has roughly 16,000 kilometers of trunk pipelines and gas lines. The Oldelval expansion and the Vaca Muerta Sur oil pipeline already unlocked a sustained exportable surplus of 250,000 barrels a day, and gas production has stabilized above 150 million cubic meters a day thanks to the Gasoducto Norte reversal and the Perito Moreno expansion. Even so, industry estimates cited by BBVA Research put the additional infrastructure investment needed at $15–20 billion — oil pipelines to the Atlantic, modular liquefaction plants, and deepwater ports capable of loading VLCC tankers.
RIGI: $19.6 Billion and Counting
Argentina's Régimen de Incentivo para Grandes Inversiones — the large-investment incentive regime — has formalized 12 energy and mining projects in 2026 with documented capital commitments of $19.574 billion. Nine are mining projects worth $13.24 billion; three are oil and gas, worth $6.334 billion.
The three hydrocarbon projects are concrete and dated. TGS's Gasoducto Perito Moreno Tramo I expansion ($513 million) adds 95,400 horsepower of compression and 14 million cubic meters a day of transport capacity, targeting an April 2027 start. The San Matías Pipeline ($1.3 billion) will run roughly 480 kilometers from Tratayén to San Antonio Oeste, carrying 27 million cubic meters a day toward future liquefaction plants on the Golfo San Matías. And Pampa Energía's Rincón de Aranda project in Añelo ($4.521 billion) is a full-cycle shale oil development — 259 wells, a central plant, oil and gas pipelines, water treatment — designed to process 45,000 barrels of oil and 800,000 cubic meters of gas a day, with output aimed squarely at export markets.
Two more energy projects — a $2.7 billion Pampa Energía urea plant and a $360 million Compañía Mega expansion — have Evaluation Committee approval but were still awaiting formal adhesion as of early August. Include those and the 2026 energy-and-mining pipeline reaches 14 projects and roughly $22.6 billion.
What This Means for the Position We Hold
None of this is abstract for us. Terra Chachahuen sits inside a thesis we have been building since the UAE's OPEC exit and the first Hormuz shock last spring: capital exits chokepoint-dependent supply and moves toward producers who can grow output without having to defend a shipping lane to do it. Vaca Muerta's structural growth rate — 36% a year, compounding for eight years — is not a story that needs a geopolitical crisis to keep working. It is a story that a geopolitical crisis simply accelerates.
BBVA Research's own projection is that Argentina's energy sector could rival agriculture as a source of foreign currency by 2030, if the pipeline and port buildout keeps pace. The Cámara de Exploración y Producción de Hidrocarburos goes further, estimating oil output could double over the next decade with sufficient infrastructure, and gas more than double. Global oil demand is still expected to grow through 2030, just at a modest 0.3% a year; gas at 1.4%. Argentina does not need the world to consume more energy to win this decade. It needs the ducts, the liquefaction trains, and the ports to get built — and that is precisely the bottleneck where committed, on-the-ground capital earns its return.
We are not asking anyone to take our word for the macro picture. We are telling you where our own capital sits inside it.