YPF, Italy’s Eni and the UAE’s XRG have filed Argentina’s largest-ever application for investment incentives, for Argentina LNG, a $51 billion project to turn Vaca Muerta shale gas into liquefied natural gas for export.
The August 14 filing, under the Large Investment Incentive Regime known as RIGI, seeks decades of tax and customs stability. The scheme was created by President Milei’s government to draw large-scale foreign capital into energy, mining and infrastructure. If the project reaches a final investment decision, which the partners are targeting for the end of this year, it would be the single largest private investment ever channeled through RIGI.
The project’s endpoint is Punta Colorada, a stretch of coast on Río Negro’s Golfo San Matías that counted four registered residents in the 2022 census. YPF and its partners plan two floating liquefaction units there, fed by a new 437-kilometer pipeline connecting Vaca Muerta’s gas fields in Neuquén to the coast, with a combined export capacity of 12 million tonnes of LNG a year. Operations are projected to begin in 2027 or 2028, assuming both the RIGI application and the final investment decision clear on schedule.
Researchers at the Laboratorio de Ideas Sostenibles, working with support from the Harvard Innovation Lab, project that Punta Colorada could eventually house around 25,000 people, a jump of several thousand times its current population. They are warning officials and developers against repeating the mistakes of Añelo, the town nearest Vaca Muerta’s onshore wells, according to Buenos Aires Herald reporting. Añelo grew explosively over the past decade without matching investment in housing, water, sanitation or roads, absorbing thousands of oil workers and contractors far faster than local services could keep pace. Planners fear Punta Colorada, starting from an even smaller base, could see the same dynamic on a larger scale.
Laboratorio director Joaquín Tomé has proposed a three-pillar strategy for the area, built around industrial activity tied to the LNG plant, a diversified tourism economy, and preservation of the coastline’s environment, which includes a rare species of algae found in only seven locations worldwide. He has also questioned the kind of sweeping population forecasts Argentine officials have floated elsewhere: Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger recently projected that mining investment alone could draw a million new residents to the northern province of Catamarca over the next thirty years, a figure Tomé has publicly called unrealistic.
Argentina LNG’s ownership has already shifted once. Shell exited the venture roughly a year after joining, leaving YPF to rebuild the partnership around Eni and XRG, the international energy investment arm ADNOC launched in 2024 with more than $80 billion in committed capital. The $51 billion price tag would make it the largest single project YPF has brought to RIGI, ahead of the broader pipeline of RIGI-eligible projects that YPF chief executive Horacio Marín has separately valued above $150 billion in recent weeks.