PECOM, the Pérez Companc group's oil and gas company, completed its first export of self-marketed crude, loading 714,000 barrels of Escalante for Hawaii on behalf of Trafigura.
PECOM said the Hafnia Galatea had finished loading 113,500 cubic meters (m³) of Escalante crude, about 714,000 barrels, bound for Hawaii, as Shale24 has learned. The shipment came just over two months after PECOM signed its first contract to sell crude from its own production with Trafigura, one of the world's largest physical commodity traders. At signing in July, the company said the first delivery would follow within months.
The vessel is a Singapore-flagged LR2 tanker built in 2019, with a deadweight of about 110,000 tonnes, and the cargo travels for Trafigura's account.
For PECOM, it is the first operation in which it has placed its own production directly on the international market. Until the deal, the company sold its crude at the wellhead to a third party, which decided the destination and kept the margin on the marketing leg. The contract was negotiated by San Benito Upstream, the related company the group uses as its vehicle for that side of the business.
Production figures put the shipment's scale in context. According to sworn Chapter IV production returns filed with Argentina's Secretariat of Energy, PECOM operated 161,973 m³ of oil in Chubut province in July on a gross basis (roughly 32,900 barrels per day, or bbl/d).
The Hafnia Galatea cargo equals 70% of that month's volume, or almost 22 days of output from the areas the company operates in the San Jorge Gulf Basin, a mature conventional oil basin in Patagonia. Since May, that perimeter has included Manantiales Behr, a block acquired from YPF, Argentina's state-controlled oil and gas company, in the operator's filings.
One Refinery, Mostly Argentine Crude
Hawaii produces no crude and has a single operating refinery: the Kapolei plant on Oahu owned by Par Pacific, the Houston-based refiner. The 94,000 bbl/d unit processed 89,800 bbl/d in the first quarter of 2026, a quarterly record, according to results the company reported. At that rate, PECOM's cargo covers about eight days of runs.
The refinery knows Argentine crude well. The Hawaii State Energy Office's Fuel Imports Dashboard, built on cargo-tracking data from Vortexa, the energy data and analytics firm, shows that Argentina supplied 62% of the light sweet crude that reached the islands in 2025. Light sweet is the dominant grade, at 69% of the state's crude imports. The second-largest grade by volume, heavy sweet, made up 17% of the total and came entirely from Argentine ports.
Combined, nearly six in ten barrels of crude Hawaii imported last year came from Argentina. The rest came from Libya, Nigeria, Guyana, Brazil and Alaska, which supplies the entire medium sour portion of the refinery's crude slate.
Escalante, a heavy, low-sulfur crude, is the grade the San Jorge Gulf Basin sells into export markets, and it suits a refinery that seeks sweet barrels to produce jet fuel, gasoline and diesel for a state entirely dependent on seaborne supply.
PECOM Takes Control of the Marketing Leg
The Trafigura contract was signed with two stated outlets, the domestic market and exports. The first operation chose exports, giving PECOM a say in the part of the chain where the value of its barrel is set once it leaves the field: destination, buyer and timing of sale.
On the other side of the trade, Hawaii refining is in a high-margin cycle. The Hawaii Index, the margin indicator Par Pacific publishes for its plant, averaged $46.06/bbl in the second quarter of 2026, against $8.57/bbl a year earlier, in a quarter when the refinery cut throughput to 73,200 bbl/d for a planned maintenance turnaround.
PECOM returned to operating oil fields in August 2024, when it bought the El Trebol–Escalante and Campamento Central–Canadon Perdido clusters from YPF. It later added Manantiales Behr and agreed to buy a 57% stake in El Corcobo, a conventional block in Mendoza and La Pampa provinces, from Pluspetrol, an Argentine independent oil and gas producer. In two years, it went from producing nothing to marketing its own crude.
The grade that launched that marketing business shares its name with El Trebol–Escalante, one of the two areas with which PECOM returned to production in 2024.