A sale of the unit would come simply three years after it was created as YPF — and oil corporations the world over — have regarded to reposition themselves within the face of the power transition.
YPF Litio has been exploring acreage in Catamarca province in Argentina’s nook of South America’s so-called lithium triangle, shared with Chile and Bolivia. Different large Argentine oil drillers, just like the Pan American Vitality Group and a unit of billionaire Paolo Rocca’s Techint Group, even have been diversifying into the nation’s lithium assets.
YPF Litio additionally helped the earlier leftist authorities’s efforts to nurture a lithium-ion battery trade in Argentina, relatively than overseas. Along with Catamarca, it brokered a non-binding settlement with China’s Zijin Mining Group Co. to make battery cathodes.
Underneath new administration appointed by the federal government of President Javier Milei — a libertarian who’s voiced little curiosity in nationwide battery improvement — YPF is as a substitute completely targeted on ramping up manufacturing within the Vaca Muerta, not solely by drilling extra wells however by spearheading key infrastructure tasks.
YPF already has divested 22 growing old non-shale fields and it’s in talks with takers for about 30 extra, whereas plans are afoot to promote gasoline companies in Chile and Brazil and a stake in a Buenos Aires pure fuel distributor.
Chief govt officer Horacio Marin has vowed to carry onto worthwhile ventures, like a fertilizer producer that’s a shopper of YPF’s pure fuel, in addition to to maintain exploring two new oil frontiers: one other shale patch and deepwater blocks off the Atlantic coast.
To that finish, YPF Agro, a money-making agriculture enterprise, could possibly be made a standalone self-financing unit like energy producer YPF Luz, the particular person mentioned. YPF Agro faucets Argentina’s big crop trade by promoting diesel and fertilizers to farmers and taking soybeans as cost in trades value about $1 billion a yr.
In the meantime, it’s unclear what is going to occur with a battery program at Y-TEC, a analysis and improvement middle that’s affiliated with YPF Litio. Marin mentioned he desires researchers to concentrate on know-how that may assist the push within the Vaca Muerta, the place it’s already cheaper to supply crude than within the Permian Basin, in line with Rystad Vitality.
(By Jonathan Gilbert)