Vaca Muerta
Vaca Muerta (German: "Dead Cow") is an oil shale deposit in the Neuquén Basin in Argentina , which extends over the provinces of Neuquén , Río Negro , La Pampa and Mendoza . The formation is considered to be one of the largest oil shale deposits in the world. The Argentine government is promoting the exploitation of the oil and gas deposits there.
The geologist Charles Edwin Weaver discovered the oil shale layers on the edge of the Sierra de la Vaca Muerte mountain range during investigations on behalf of a US oil company. In 1931 he published his discoveries. In 2011, the state-owned oil company YPF confirmed these findings. In November 2011, YPF estimated the deposit at 927 million barrels of which 741 million barrels were shale oil and the remainder gas. In February 2012 this estimate was increased to a total of 22,500 barrels. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates recoverable reserves at 16.2 billion barrels of oil and 308 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This corresponds to a tenfold increase in Argentina's previously known oil reserves.
The oil shale layers are between 60 and 520 meters thick. Preparations for the exploitation of the deposit, using non-conventional oil production methods such as fracking, have been underway since 2013 . The Vaca Muerte development area was divided into several blocks. Wintershall has a 50% stake in a joint venture to exploit the “Aguada Federal” block. The Argentine government has promised to improve the infrastructure, including examining a rail link to the coast. In March 2018, 7,600 cubic meters of oil and 12,700,000 cubic meters of natural gas were produced daily in the Vaca Muerta area.
The initial hopes of an Argentine oil boom have now turned out to be exaggerated (as of 2018), not least because the falling oil price makes the exploitation of oil shale unprofitable.
Web links
- Süddeutsche Zeitung on oil finds in "Vaca Muerta"
- Dossier of the Argentine newspaper "La Nación" (Spanish)