Unidentified Company Representative: Another question came from Credit Suisse from Regis Cardoso. She wants to know if you can give us more details on YPF’s plans for lithium exploration, size of opportunity, CapEx and timing?
Alejandro Lew: Some of that was already tackled also. Clearly, so far, we have become involved in an exploration project in the province of Catamarca. It’s 20,000 hectares site where we believe that there is interesting brine concentration for us to work on. Of course, I — there is a competitive advantage that YPF has in terms of the seismic information that our company has from past works in the northern of the country — in the north part of the country. So that is a competitive advantage for YPF to work on lithium exploration as well. And because that’s clearly not that I’m an expert, but our geologists tell us that, that’s a key competitive advantage. And — so far, we did decide that we were not going to enter into a more evolved project paying prices or costs that we cannot, at this point, make sure that those are fair prices.
And so we decided to go for an early exploration, so a greenfield project. And clearly, we are looking for further opportunities. But so far, that is our main project. We expect to enter probably into production, if we are successful in our exploration to enter into a production phase before 2030. And to get there, we probably need about — it’s not a large investment probably in the order of $50 million to $60 million in the next 3 years to prove the available resources and to appraise them. And then if we enter into a production clearly into a production phase, that would probably be somewhere north of $300 million in investment, but to put together the facilities required to enter into full production mode, targeting somewhere in the order of 25,000 tonnes per year at this site.
Unidentified Company Representative: And Regis Cardoso has another question. Can you also provide more details on what you believe will be right in green hydrogen capital requirements?
Alejandro Lew: At this point, it’s very difficult to answer that question. Clearly, what we do have in mind is that a key variable or a key input for the future evolution of green — or the competitiveness of green hydrogen depends on the capacity to provide efficient renewable electricity. And there is where Pablo tackled also in his presentation, we see Argentina having a tremendous potential there with capacity factors well above the world average. Particularly in our case, through YPF Luz, we — our capacity factors in wind farms in the south of the country is also above the Argentine average where we have 1 wind farm of 60% capacity — average capacity factors in Manantiales Behr, for example, and an average, at 52. So we definitely think that Argentina and has put — was put out by a few months ago, Argentina is a top 3 competitive player — potential competitive player for green hydrogen production, given its low cost for renewable electricity.
So at this point, again, we mapped out in the presentation that we could put together efficiently in a very ambitious way, a group of wind farms in Patagonia, aggregating 100 gigawatts of total capacity. That would be a size that our technicians consider that would be efficient to transmit to a center point that could be an H2 producing facility, and that would imply total — or a plant for producing about 8.5 million tonnes per annum of green hydrogen. So clearly, that’s extremely ambitious, 100 gigawatt is 2.5x the current total installed capacity in Argentina in terms of power electricity or power generation, but that’s just to give an idea of the potential scalability of such opportunity. But of course, it depends. Going into that will depend on how technology electrolysis evolves and whether H2 actually a green hydrogen becomes mainstream, as many are expecting, which is still difficult to know, right?
