Big Oil Rushes Into Argentina’s Vaca Muerta Shale
Canada Clears Path for West Coast Oil Pipeline Build Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews.
Local and international energy companies are vying for additional exploration blocks in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale basin as the Middle East crisis and the blocked Strait of Hormuz are reigniting a global race to tap resources outside conflict zones.
business until a few years ago, shale exploration and production is now gaining momentum outside North America.
And Argentina’s Vaca Muerta is top of the list of oil and gas companies, including U.S.
shale giants, as a de-risked basin with proven geology that’s far away from having to rely on the Strait of Hormuz or any other corridor in the Middle East to ship barrels out.
Interest in the new licensing round for 15 blocks in Vaca Muerta—the biggest auction in the basin in a decade—is expected to be high as the U.S.
shale boom goes global and energy companies are shifting their bets from conflict zones to safer jurisdictions, analysts say.
Vaca Muerta—Spanish for ‘dead cow’—has been dubbed theArgentinian Permian, although its geologic properties have beencompared more appropriately to the Eagle Ford.
The shale play isestimated to holdrecoverable resources consisting of 16 billion barrels of oil and 308 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Those numbers make the Vaca Muerta the world’s second-largest shale gas deposit and the fourth-biggest shale oil resource.Related: Xi-Trump Summit Disappoints as Oil Bulls Regain Momentum After a slow start earlier this decade, Vaca Muerta is now booming, with crude oil production increasing by about 16% from last year, and now topping800,000 barrels per day(bpd).
By the end of the decade, and possibly sooner, the Argentinian shale play will be able to deliver 1 million bpd of crude oil, as well as a lot of natural gas, industry and analysts say.
Vaca Muerta has already made Argentinathe fourth-largestoil producer in Latin America—a position that may improve in the future as the government prioritizes the development of the local energy industry, encouraging infrastructure projects aiming to boost the offtake capacity of the Vaca Muerta.
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