Global energy markets
ENI, the Italian energy company, has told U.S. regulators and institutional investors that the Final Investment Decision for Argentina LNG — the phased floating LNG project that YPF, Argentina's state-controlled oil and gas company; ENI; and XRG, ADNOC's international investment arm, are co-developing in Vaca Muerta — is among the most important milestones on its 2026 corporate calendar.
The confirmation came in two near-consecutive filings. On March 4, ENI filed a Form 6-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission covering Q4 2025 and the full year, signed by board director Giuseppe Zafarana. On March 19, CEO Claudio Descalzi and his team unveiled the 2026–2030 strategic plan at ENI's Capital Markets Update, where Argentina LNG was listed among the FIDs the company expects to approve this year.
Whether that FID arrives on schedule depends on factors the plan documents cannot yet resolve — among them the pace of FEED engineering, commercial offtake agreements with Asian buyers, and the integrity of the global FLNG turbine supply chain, which industry analysts say is already showing strain from Middle East disruption.
What the 6-K Confirmed
The 6-K listed the strategic advances of Q4 2025. Among the E&P milestones — six major projects brought online during the year in Angola, Indonesia, Norway and the Republic of Congo — one entry weighs more heavily for an Argentine reading than any other operational data point: the 12 MTPA integrated upstream-midstream project has advanced toward FID with the signing of a Joint Development Agreement among the three partners.
The filing also recalls the October milestone, when ENI and YPF signed the Final Technical Project Description, and describes the development architecture: two floating LNG units of 6 MTPA each, with a phased approach that allows total capacity to scale to 30 MTPA over the long term.
The same 6-K confirms another piece aligned with the project. In November, ENI agreed with YPF to acquire a 50% non-operating working interest and operatorship of the OFF-5 block in Uruguayan offshore waters, a decision framed within Argentina LNG. The transaction still awaits Uruguayan regulatory approval, but it signals that the ENI–YPF partnership is being conceived at a regional scale broader than the Neuquén Basin.
The Balance Sheet That Supports the Bet
The 2025 year-end numbers matter. In Q4, ENI reported adjusted net income of €1.2 billion, 35% above the same quarter of 2024, with annual operating cash flow of €12.5 billion. Full-year production reached 1.73 million boe/d and the reserve replacement ratio landed at 167%, with 900 million boe of new resources discovered. That financial foundation is what sustains the investment appetite for a project on the scale of Argentina LNG.
Two weeks after the 6-K, at the March 19 Capital Markets Update, ENI raised its base case. The company lifted its reference Brent scenario to $70 per barrel, $8 above the preliminary outlook it had issued in February, and projected more than €70 billion in cumulative operating cash flow over the five-year plan, with 14% compound annual growth per share. Gross capital expenditure for 2026 was set at around €7 billion, with a plan average below €6 billion per year, on the back of efficiency programs and the deconsolidation of selected activities.
Among the project approvals flagged for the year, the document listed the North Kutei Basin developments in Indonesia, part of the joint venture with Petronas that will close at mid-year under the name Searah, and confirmed the expectation of sanctioning the Argentine project before the fiscal year ends.
The market read was unambiguous. At the February 26 Q4 earnings call that preceded the update, Goldman Sachs sector analyst Michele Della Vigna asked ENI's leadership about FID priorities for 2026; management placed Argentina at the top of the list, ahead of Côte d'Ivoire, Cyprus and other African geographies.
The Scenario the War Overtook
On March 19, when Descalzi presented the five-year plan, Brent was trading close to the $70 threshold ENI had chosen as reference. A month later, with the Strait of Hormuz closed and the escalation between the United States and Iran back on the table, Brent closed April 20 with a 5.6% jump to $95.48 per barrel and has held at that level since.
The clause ENI presented in the fine print — the one that releases 60% of any additional cash flow in scenarios above plan — has stopped being a rhetorical option and started operating on the ground. Twenty-five dollars per barrel sustained over a quarter moves billions through the Italian group's P&L, and that cash has two possible destinations: larger shareholder distributions or acceleration of committed capex.
The same shock that fattens cash flow, however, injects friction into the Argentina LNG schedule. At CERAWeek 2026, Bloomberg Opinion columnist Javier Blas argued that the world has no instruments to compensate for the loss of the Strait of Hormuz if the closure extends for months. Rystad Energy, the energy research and consultancy firm, quantified the sectoral damage at $25 billion for the Gulf and flagged something more uncomfortable for the Vaca Muerta partners: the liquefaction turbine supply chain, which is produced today by a concentrated pool of manufacturers, is already showing delays that reach Argentina.
The most sensitive front for the consortium is another. ADNOC's Habshan gas plant, the core of Abu Dhabi's domestic upstream, has recorded two partial shutdowns in fifteen days, according to Shale24 reporting. ADNOC is the majority shareholder of XRG, the Emirati partner in Argentina LNG.
Every day that Habshan operates under geopolitical pressure raises the opportunity cost of the capital the Emiratis had been prepared to allocate to the Golfo San Matías — and reinforces the reality that ADNOC's home assets are now a higher-priority call on XRG's balance sheet.
Project Architecture and the Capital Still to Be Raised
The project shape is defined. Two FLNG units of 6 MTPA each, equivalent to roughly 9 billion cubic meters per year of gas per unit, moored in the Golfo San Matías, a deepwater gulf in Argentina's Río Negro province suited to loading VLCCs, about 35 kilometers south of Las Grutas.
Initial gas feed will come from existing conventional and unconventional fields through installed pipelines, and later from dedicated pipelines built as part of the project to bring molecules exclusively from Vaca Muerta. The competitive edge against U.S. LNG in Asian markets, which pays a higher freight bill, is one of the arguments the partners repeat in every pitch to potential financiers.
On that front, the piece missing in 2025 arrived with JP Morgan as structuring bank. The U.S. bank was hired by YPF to place up to $16 billion of project finance, within a typical structure that covers between 70% and 80% of total development costs, estimated at around $20 billion. If the deal closes, it will be the largest private project finance loan in Argentine history. First LNG cargoes are planned for 2030–2031.
The operational reference behind that timetable is recent. The FLNG Nguya that came online in the Republic of Congo on February 7 was built in 35 months, a benchmark ENI itself frames as the new industry standard, and Coral North in Mozambique, which took FID in October, is targeting operations in 2028.
If Argentina LNG's partners reproduce that learning curve from a mid-2026 FID, the 2030–2031 first-shipments schedule stops being an optimistic projection and becomes a direct extrapolation of what ENI has just executed on sister projects.
The LNG portfolio ENI presented at the Capital Markets Update has a geographic coherence worth underscoring. In the equatorial Atlantic, Congo LNG reached its 3 MTPA design capacity with the Phase 2 ramp-up and the arrival of FLNG Nguya, which loaded its first cargo in February. In the Indian Ocean, Mozambique added FID for Coral North, a 3.6 MTPA expansion that will lift national production to 7 MTPA when it comes online. In the South Atlantic, Argentina now enters the map with an initial 12 MTPA and a theoretical ceiling of 30 MTPA.
The three projects share more than the FLNG template: the same partners appear in varying combinations. XRG is part of Coral North alongside ENI, CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation), ENH (Mozambique's state hydrocarbon company), and Kogas (Korea Gas Corporation), and is now joining Argentina LNG. The logic of Emirati capital is following a clear pattern.
The Clock to FID
Horacio Marín, YPF chairman and CEO, set the timetable at the JDA signing ceremony, saying the three partners would work intensively "to reach FID during the second half of 2026." The same clock appears, with fewer words but the same certainty, in ENI's March 19 investor presentation. And in the JDA communiqué itself, Guido Brusco, ENI's Chief Operating Officer for Global Natural Resources, framed the project as among the most significant gas developments taking shape worldwide, citing technological leadership and strategic vision as its defining features.
Between now and then, the technical teams have to close out FEED studies, conclude commercial agreements with the buyers of the volume, and lock in the financing structure. Not a small list. The recent history of Argentine unconventional gas shows that projects of this scale are not signed until every piece fits.