Daniel Gerold, Founder and Director of G&G Energy Consultants
For Daniel Gerold, one of the country’s most respected energy consultants, the challenge of achieving the goal of accumulating International Reserves agreed with the IMF will be conditioned by the exponential demand for energy imports the country will need this year.
After a month of record campaign revenue, which exceeded $ 4.2 billion last month, in which the Central Bank failed to capture even 10% of those liquidated dollars, the view of most City economists is focused on the skill of the monetary system. authority to make tickets for its coffers. For Gerold, however, this difficulty was somewhat predictable.
“There will be a huge fiscal deficit this year for this energy supply to market segments that do not pay the real costs “, warned the specialist, in a panel organized by IAEF (Argentine Institute of Financial Managers), with the slogan “Rebuilding a better country. Opportunities for future generations “.
Despite having assured a short term that will be “complicated”, the founder and director of G&G Energy Consultants has foreseen an opportunity for growth for the country in the medium and long term based on the energy sector.
In the calculations made in the new global context given by the increase in commodity prices, Argentina will need imports of 11,000 million dollars to guarantee the energy supply of its production matrix.
The landscape is particularly complicated this year since geopolitical conflictsbut rising global prices For Gerold they are a trend visible from before: “The price of energy was already rising, even before the war in Ukraine, because there were no new projects in the pipeline. Investments in oil and gas production were 40% lower than in 2015, “she warned.
Gerold pointed out that Argentina today it produces the cheapest natural gas in the world. “We have a good law on hydrocarbons that is outdated today because it aimed at oil self-sufficiency, when what is currently a priority is economic self-sufficiencyessential condition for the development of a global energy policy, with the necessary investments “.
However, forward the global situation offers Argentina an opportunity.“Over the past 18 months we have seen an increase in productivity in Dead cow which reduces the costs of exploiting oil and gas “, said the specialist, adding:” Going forward, the exploitation of these resources becomes profitable. However, Argentina must leave behind a twenty-year scenario in which the normal thing was the economic emergency “.
“The normal thing is the emergency, that the laws that regulate the sector do not govern, that there is no stable macro. This conspires with the long term”, Gerold warned in front of the financial executives of the main companies in the country. To get out of this situation, for the specialist, “nothing depends on a government anymore. We have been living in a context of anomalies for 20 years”, he assured him.
To attract the long-term investments the sector needs to launch monumental projects like Vaca Muerta, Gerold said it needs to: “signed:”political consensus on certain logical rules, so as not to continually change the laws “.
Source: Clarin
