Vaca Muerta, Patagonian Hydrogen and Transition Infrastructure, Feasibility and Implementation Constraints

2.3 Infrastructure Frictions, Water Demands, and Indigenous Land Claims

Applying the theoretical framework of hydro-social territories illuminates how energy infrastructure in northern Patagonia does not expand across neutral geographic space, but rather imposes distinct spatial, regulatory, and ecological imperatives upon previously inhabited landscapes. As unconventional fossil fuel extraction intensifies across the Vaca Muerta formation, the physical materialities and subsurface claims of the hydrocarbon industry directly clash with ancestral forms of land occupancy and tenure. These structural frictions materialize in contentious jurisdictional disputes where extractive projects confront indigenous rights and sovereignty, notably demonstrated in the legal and territorial struggles of Mapuche communities such as Lof Kaxipayiñ and Lof Fvta Xayen (Radovich & Balazote, 2024). Simultaneously, the development of complementary energy infrastructure reveals deep scalar tensions over resource sovereignty, environmental governance, and regional river basins. In the territorial periphery of Vaca Muerta, state planners and corporate actors present energy projects as bounded and discrete interventions, thereby obscuring their networked integration into broader extractivist configurations. In response, socio-environmental assemblies mobilize multi-scalar political discourses centered on conceptual frameworks of free water and collective watershed protection, formulating a distinct hydro-social consciousness to actively challenge centralized top-down planning (Scoville-Simonds et al., 2024). Consequently, regional energy transition pathways encounter severe socio-political implementation constraints when technical agendas disregard established territorial relations. Implementing decarbonized vectors or sustaining extraction without addressing these structural frictions perpetuates ongoing governance impasses, demonstrating that sustainable infrastructure viability fundamentally depends on recognizing community rights and hydro-social realities.