Argentina's Incentive Regime for Large Investments, known as RIGI, was created by the Ley Bases, Law 27,742, passed in June 2024 after months of negotiation between President Javier Milei's government and Congress. The implementing decree followed in August. RIGI offers qualifying projects 30 years of tax, customs, foreign exchange and regulatory stability, along with a lower corporate income tax rate, accelerated depreciation and relief from export duties after an initial period. It also gives access to international arbitration for disputes. The general investment threshold is USD 200 million, with higher thresholds for some sectors: USD 300 million for oil and gas transport and storage, and USD 600 million for export-oriented gas projects and offshore developments, according to the government's summary for investors.
The regime is open to many sectors, including mining, infrastructure, forestry and technology. But energy is the clearest test. Our view is that RIGI is well designed for its central purpose, which is to persuade investors to commit billions of dollars to infrastructure that will take years to pay back in a country with a long history of capital controls, defaults and policy reversals. Its weakness is that it is only as durable as the political consensus behind it. Thirty years of stability promised by one government has to survive the next ones.
Why energy needs RIGI
The Vaca Muerta shale formation in Neuquén province holds some of the largest shale oil and gas resources outside North America. Production has grown strongly over the past few years, and Argentina has moved from being a net energy importer towards becoming an exporter. But exporting at scale requires infrastructure that does not yet exist: oil pipelines to the Atlantic coast, export terminals and, for gas, liquefaction plants to ship LNG to world markets.
Such infrastructure is capital-intensive and long-lived. A large LNG project can cost many billions of dollars and take years to build before it earns any revenue. Investors need confidence that the tax regime will not change, that they can access foreign exchange to service debt and pay dividends, and that they can export without sudden duties. In Argentina, all three have historically been uncertain. Successive governments imposed export taxes, restricted access to dollars and froze domestic energy prices. RIGI is designed to remove those risks for the projects that qualify.
What RIGI provides
The stability guarantee is the core of the regime. Projects that join are protected for 30 years from changes in tax, customs and foreign exchange rules that would worsen their position. The regime reduces corporate income tax for qualifying projects to 25 per cent, allows accelerated depreciation of capital investment and progressively frees exporters from the obligation to repatriate and convert foreign currency earnings. Disputes can be taken to international arbitration rather than only to Argentine courts.
For energy exporters, the foreign exchange provisions are probably the most valuable. Argentina's currency controls, known as the cepo, have made it difficult for companies to move money in and out of the country. The ability to retain a growing share of export proceeds abroad allows project sponsors to raise international financing against those revenues.
Oil before gas
The first energy projects to benefit are likely to be in oil rather than gas. Shale oil from Vaca Muerta is already flowing, and the immediate bottleneck is the capacity to move it to the coast and load it onto export tankers. Oil pipelines and terminals cost less than LNG plants, pay back faster and serve a global market that can absorb additional barrels without long-term offtake contracts. Industry groups led by YPF have been preparing such projects, and RIGI's stability provisions make them easier to finance. Gas liquefaction is the bigger prize but also the harder one, because it needs long-term buyers willing to sign for Argentine supply years in advance.
The risks
The first risk is political. RIGI passed with a narrow majority as part of a wider reform package. Argentina's history includes governments that reversed predecessors' commitments, including the nationalisation of YPF's majority shareholding in 2012. A future government hostile to the regime could try to amend or challenge it. The arbitration provisions offer some protection, but arbitration is slow, and winning an award against a sovereign is not the same as collecting it.
The second risk is fiscal and distributional. Tax concessions for large projects reduce revenue in a country that is trying to eliminate a chronic fiscal deficit. Provinces, which own subsoil resources and collect royalties, must also adhere to the regime for its benefits to be complete. If RIGI projects generate large profits while Argentines face austerity, political pressure to revisit their terms will grow.
The third risk is market timing. Global LNG supply is set to expand strongly in the second half of the decade as large projects in Qatar and the United States come online. An Argentine LNG project that reaches production in the 2030s will enter a well-supplied market and will have to compete on cost. RIGI improves Argentina's competitiveness, but it cannot remove the cost disadvantage of building liquefaction capacity far from major markets, or the seasonal pattern of Argentine gas demand, which peaks in the southern winter.
What would strengthen the regime
Three things would make RIGI more credible. Broad political support, including from opposition parties and provincial governors, would reduce the risk of reversal. Transparent publication of approved projects, investment commitments and fiscal costs would build public confidence. And steady progress on macroeconomic stabilisation, including the eventual removal of currency controls for all firms, would mean that RIGI's protections become less exceptional over time.
Our assessment
RIGI is the most serious attempt in decades to give long-term investors in Argentina the predictability they need. For Vaca Muerta, it could unlock pipelines, export terminals and possibly LNG plants that would turn Argentina into a significant energy exporter. But a 30-year promise is only as good as the institutions that stand behind it. The regime's success will depend on whether it attracts investment quickly enough to show benefits before the next election cycle, and on whether those benefits are visible to Argentines beyond the companies that qualify.