IEB Construcciones (IEBC), the former Dycasa, has been chosen to manage construction of the dedicated gas pipeline that will supply Argentina's first large-scale LNG export project.
The mandate hands one of the most schedule-sensitive roles in the Vaca Muerta export build-out to a company that carries no energy-infrastructure record of its own. IEBC is the continuation of Dycasa, a storied public-works contractor that a Buenos Aires capital-markets group bought a year and a half ago and is still reconverting.
The firm said it signed a contract on June 11 with San Matías Pipeline, the special-purpose vehicle building the dedicated line for the Southern Energy consortium, comprising Pan American Energy (PAE), Argentina's largest private oil producer; YPF, Argentina's state-controlled oil and gas company; Pampa Energía, a diversified Argentine energy company; Harbour Energy, the U.K.-based E&P company; and Golar LNG, the Norway-based LNG infrastructure company. The agreement covers construction-management services along the route from Tratayén, in Neuquén province, to San Antonio, in Río Negro province.
IEBC has traded on the Buenos Aires exchange since October 1994 and inherits the lineage of Dycasa, which began operating in Buenos Aires in 1968. For nearly six decades the contractor was one of the country's major public-works builders, delivering sections of the Autopistas del Sol highway, the tunnels of the Buenos Aires subway's H line, and the Belgrano Sur viaduct, among dozens of road, hydraulic, and sanitation projects.
Its catalogue also included gas-compression plants and work for nuclear power stations, a detail that tempers the idea that the new manager arrives without heavy-infrastructure experience.
The turn came in late 2024. Dragados, the construction arm of Spain's ACS group chaired by Florentino Pérez, withdrew from Argentina and sold its controlling stake to Inversora Mercedes, the vehicle in which Juan Ignacio Abuchdid, owner of Grupo IEB, shares ownership with Martín Gándara (Atomik) and Ezequiel Fernández (Natal Inversiones).
The price was around $2 million, a modest figure for a company with half a century of history, explained by the halt in public works and the negative net worth the builder carried. Abuchdid said at the time that he chose to buy Dycasa, rather than build a new contractor, for its accumulated experience and quality certifications and because it was already listed.
From Capital Markets to the Real Economy
Grupo IEB is a capital-markets holding: a clearing and settlement agent with its own trading platform, mutual funds, and peso and dollar operations. The Dycasa purchase was its move into bricks and mortar.
The initial plan targeted real estate, with Puerto Nizuc, a development of more than $300 million in Hudson, as its flagship, alongside projects in Puerto Madero's Dock 4 and in Núñez. Close to 90% of IEBC's revenue now comes from private work, with several public contracts frozen since the change of national government.
The San Matías Pipeline contract shifts that frontier. Less than a year ago, Abuchdid said the company was not yet bidding in Vaca Muerta but was adding professionals to enter that market. Managing the dedicated pipeline is the realization of that intent: the first large-scale energy-infrastructure mandate the former Dycasa has taken since the change of control.
The Contract Date Points Past April 2028
Construction management is not the laying of pipe. San Matías Pipeline has already allocated the hard pieces of the work: the pipe went to Welspun of India; the line's civil works to a temporary joint venture of Italy's Sicim and local firm Víctor Contreras; the intermediate compressor plant to OPS of Neuquén; and the subsea tie-in to BUZCA of Colombia. What was missing was who coordinates them, the role the former Dycasa now takes under its construction-management contract.
The contract runs to September 30, 2028. Official project presentations had placed the pipeline's start-up in April 2028; a mandate extending to the close of the third quarter aligns more closely with the schedule of the second floating liquefaction unit (the MKII, expected in the second half of 2028) than with that April date. The first vessel, the Hilli Episeyo, will start earlier, toward the end of 2027, supplied by a shorter connection to the existing gas grid.
The Vessels Set the Clock
The pipeline advances in parallel packages, each with its own supplier: the laying of the 36-inch pipe, the Allen compressor plant, the fiscal metering station on the coast, and the tie-in to the subsea connection handled by BUZCA. Each interface between those fronts, where one company hands off and the next takes over, is a point at which the schedule can jam. Owner-side construction management exists to absorb that integration risk, which falls on no single contractor alone.
The urgency comes from the work itself. Golar LNG, owner of the vessels, has warned that the project's value depends on the hull and the pipeline being ready together: if one arrives before the other, the investment sits idle.
With the MKII targeted for the second half of 2028 and the management contract running to September of that year, the former Dycasa is responsible for holding a calendar that allows no slippage: the schedule for the first gas those vessels must liquefy.
With this signing, the supplier chain for Argentina's first gas-export pipeline adds its construction-management piece. And it comes from a contractor that two years ago barely had revenue and that today answers to a group born to operate on the stock exchange, not to lay pipe across the Río Negro steppe.