The owner of Inter Miami won a project worth US$ 1.2 billion from Techint and Mindlin in Vaca Muerta

The consortium made up of the American Pumpco –subsidiary of MasTec, of Jorge Mas, the owner of Inter Miami, the team in which Leonel Messi plays.the Italian Bonatti and the local Contreras Hermanos was left with the construction of the two pipelines that will make up the Argentina LNG project.

The other strong fact is that the Techint Group lost again in a process of this type, since it is another of the consortiums that participated in this competition.

The final award of the contract would only be signed in 20 to 30 days, according to the schedule managed by the parties involved in the process.

What distinguishes this tender from the previous ones in Vaca Muerta is the format used to define the winner: an electronic reverse auctionthe first time that this scheme has been applied in an energy infrastructure project in the Neuquén basin, as Clarín was able to reconstruct.

The work contemplates a gas pipeline 48 inches and a polyduct 24 inches, both approximately 527 kilometersdedicated exclusively to connecting Meseta Buena Esperanza with Sierra Grande. The winning bid was US$1.2 billion.

From an initial universe of around seven companies and consortia, the technical process left two finalists in the running. From there, according to sources familiar with the process, YPF set a maximum offer limit through a digital system, and from that point the two consortiums were bidding down in real time.

The peculiarity is that neither of the two bidders knew at any time the amount that the other was presenting, nor whether their competitor was still active in the auction or had withdrawn. The result, say those same sources, was “the most competitive amount” possible for the project.

Regardless of who won this time, what is beginning to consolidate is a pattern: in the latest infrastructure tenders linked to the Vaca Muerta LNG export projects, the decisive factor ended up being, almost exclusively, the economic offer.

The adoption of a blind reverse auction scheme deepens this logic: it eliminates the margin for the trajectory, logistical synergies with other works in progress or the historical relationship with the operator to be weighed, and reduces the definition to a pure variable: who can sustain the lowest price until the end, without knowing what the other is offering.

For traditional local suppliers, that format is a structural challenge. Compete blindly against international players, which in many cases enter the Argentine market for the first time and can absorb profitability metrics different from those of a company with a local cost structure, narrows the room for maneuver in each new check.

For Pumpco, a subsidiary of MasTec, the American construction company with an annual turnover close to US$14.3 billionis the first successful award in Argentina after three previous unsuccessful attempts: it had unsuccessfully bid on the reversal of the northern gas pipeline, the VMOS pipeline and the pipeline that finances Southern Energy (SESA), the other LNG initiative of Pan American Energy (PAE), YPF, Pampa Energía, Harbor Energy and Golar LNG.

On the other hand, society Techint-Sacdechaired by Paolo Rocca and Marcelo Mindlin, suffered its second consecutive defeat in the Vaca Muerta LNG export infrastructure tenders, after having been left out of the SESA pipeline weeks ago.

The civil works are just one part of the project. The provision of the pipes that will make up both pipelines still remains to be defined.a process that, according to industry sources, would be released towards the end of the month. It is the instance that in previous projects in the sector led to the greatest tensions with the local industry, with Tenaris being left out against international bidders both in the SESA gas pipeline and, now, in the civil works of Argentina LNG.