Oct 21, 2026 · 46 min · 13 segments
Argentina’s Vaca Muerta is emerging as one of the world’s most promising unconventional oil and gas plays. In this episode of ComboCast, hosts Dylan Breaux, Ben Gonzalez, and Ross Harrison are joined…
Ben GonzalezHost
To your point, and Alex's point, you know, there's a lot of, obviously, as we know, the last decade, unconventional plays that have been played out, no pun intended, in the Permian and Eagleford and Haynesville, et cetera, what have you, not for the unconventional side.
So kind of seeing how it's analogous over here across seas internationally will be interesting, kind of, especially as you guys mentioned, it's getting more and more popular and kind of headlines are hitting, you know, more so in the heart, et cetera.
So it'll be interesting to see how it kind of plays out on the unconventional side across seas and kind of how the learnings from the last decade or so are kind of translated over for sure.
And a lot of the development right now is kind of centered around a lot of different factors.
So we've had plenty of time to screw up in the U.S. You have a lot of American developers and operators down there that have kind of perfected it.
Like Chevron, Continental, a couple of other operators that when we moved down to Argentina, like we're doing three mile laterals and we're doing it without much room for error and not much room for messing up.
And another thing for kind of slower development, I know that like this was all kind of proved off that 2013 report.
We've had plenty of times, it's 2026 now, why is all this not developed out? Their concession structure and I guess royalty leasing works completely different from the US.
You can just buy net royalty acres off of private sellers and development happens really quickly.
Your concessions in the US are, two, three, four years or something, where here in the Vaca Muerta, you buy a stake in what we call a concession there, over a couple hundred thousand acres, and you have it for 35 years.
So until first production, and then it's approved and kind of approved out until production ends for those wells.
So there's really not a rush to be producing all of the approved resources out of this formation yet.
I think one of the, some of the sayings I've heard that stay quite true and are centered on international development of unconventionals is, you know, unconventional deposition, uh, and then exploration exploitation is not unique to the U S had by any means.
I mean, geology is universal, but, um, What is unique is our regulatory and legislative policies relative to the rest of the world.
And so that's why there's been a lot of influence or people moving are able to move quicker in the U.S. in order to kind of exploit these resources.
And I mean, some of the questions that might jump are so those are kind of like blocks you could think of the concessions like a expiration block or something.
To your point, and Alex's point, you know, there's a lot of, obviously, as we know, the last decade, unconventional plays that have been played out, no pun intended, in the Permian and Eagleford and Haynesville, et cetera, what have you, not for the unconventional side.
So kind of seeing how it's analogous over here across seas internationally will be interesting, kind of, especially as you guys mentioned, it's getting more and more popular and kind of headlines are hitting, you know, more so in the heart, et cetera.
So it'll be interesting to see how it kind of plays out on the unconventional side across seas and kind of how the learnings from the last decade or so are kind of translated over for sure.
And a lot of the development right now is kind of centered around a lot of different factors.
So we've had plenty of time to screw up in the U.S. You have a lot of American developers and operators down there that have kind of perfected it.
Like Chevron, Continental, a couple of other operators that when we moved down to Argentina, like we're doing three mile laterals and we're doing it without much room for error and not much room for messing up.
And another thing for kind of slower development, I know that like this was all kind of proved off that 2013 report.
We've had plenty of times, it's 2026 now, why is all this not developed out? Their concession structure and I guess royalty leasing works completely different from the US.
You can just buy net royalty acres off of private sellers and development happens really quickly.
Your concessions in the US are, two, three, four years or something, where here in the Vaca Muerta, you buy a stake in what we call a concession there, over a couple hundred thousand acres, and you have it for 35 years.
So until first production, and then it's approved and kind of approved out until production ends for those wells.
So there's really not a rush to be producing all of the approved resources out of this formation yet.
I think one of the, some of the sayings I've heard that stay quite true and are centered on international development of unconventionals is, you know, unconventional deposition, uh, and then exploration exploitation is not unique to the U S had by any means.
I mean, geology is universal, but, um, What is unique is our regulatory and legislative policies relative to the rest of the world.
And so that's why there's been a lot of influence or people moving are able to move quicker in the U.S. in order to kind of exploit these resources.
And I mean, some of the questions that might jump are so those are kind of like blocks you could think of the concessions like a expiration block or something.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.