Exxon Mobil Corp. may invest more than $10 billion as it transplants the U.S. shale-drilling model to Argentina’s Vaca Muerta region in the next few decades, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson said Thursday.
The oil giant has so far invested $200 million in the world’s second-largest shale gas deposit and plans to invest another $250 million in coming months on a pilot project, Tillerson said after meeting with Argentine President Mauricio Macri in Buenos Aires.
Unlike the mega-projects that have been Exxon’s hallmark for more than half a century, the shale developments the company began pursuing in 2010 have involved drilling hundreds of individual wells and installing thousands of miles of pipes to squeeze crude and natural gas from deep, dense, onshore fields.
New Government
Macri has been courting international corporations from Total SA to Dow Chemical Co. to Coca-Cola Co. to invest in Argentina since taking office in December. Exxon, whose annual sales dwarf the economic output of all but about 45 of the world’s nations, is building a plant to strip impurities out of natural gas as well as a pipeline network to handle the output from its Vaca Muerta wells.
“I am very encouraged by the changes that have occurred here in Argentina, with the change in government,” Tillerson said, according to a statement from the Argentine government.
Exxon’s worldwide oil and gas output is lower than it was when Tillerson began his tenure as CEO a decade ago.
Last year, the company that traces its roots to the 1880s and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust failed to replace all the crude and gas it pumped with new discoveries for the first time in 22 years. In April, S&P Global Ratings stripped Exxon of the gold-plated credit rating it had held since the Great Depression.