The shale industry requires millions of tonnes of high-quality silica sand, or proppant, transported more than 1,300 km by truck from Argentina’s Paraná River basin to Neuquén. It consumed around 5.5m tonnes in 2025, with demand potentially reaching 8m tonnes in 2026–27. Much of the supply chain still depends on road transport. That volume is forcing Argentina to confront a problem that has existed for decades: how to move large quantities of freight across a vast country when rail, waterways, ports and highways are not sufficiently integrated. The response is increasingly multimodal.     One example is the proposed revival of the railway connection to Quequén and Necochea.

The line has been without service since 2003, but four municipalities in southeastern Buenos Aires have asked the federal government to include the Ayacucho–Tandil–Lobería–Balcarce–Quequén corridor in the new railway concession framework.   The case illustrates the scale of the opportunity. Puerto Quequén handled more than 9m tonnes in 2025, yet received 281,824 trucks and no railway wagons. Vaca Muerta is now giving a long-dormant railway a potential new role in a broader freight network.      The same logic applies to maritime access. Today, vessels using Argentina’s river system reach the Atlantic through the Punta Indio Channel, a one-way route with operational constraints. The proposed Magdalena Channel would provide a more direct, bidirectional connection towards the Atlantic, potentially reducing dependence on the Montevideo area and the delays associated with Zona Alfa anchorage. The economic impact is significant when port services, pilotage and waiting times are taken into account.   The significance goes beyond sand. A more direct Atlantic outlet could strengthen Argentina’s access to long-haul markets in the Middle East and India. Depending on the trade lane, Atlantic routing around the Cape of Good Hope could also provide an alternative to Red Sea passages affected by security risks.      Several of these infrastructure projects existed long before Vaca Muerta. What they lacked was a sufficiently large and predictable cargo base capable of supporting investment. Vaca Muerta may provide exactly that.   The proposed modernisation of the railway between Bahía Blanca and Añelo is a clear example. The corridor could initially serve the shale industry, but its strategic potential is considerably greater. The railway follows the historic route towards Zapala and could eventually extend to Pino Hachado, connecting Argentina with Chile and the Pacific.   If completed, that connection would make the Argentine section of the Southern Bioceanic Corridor a reality. AIMAS’s proposed 5F integrated railway model points in the same direction: a longer multimodal corridor designed to diversify beyond proppant into agriculture, mining and container traffic.   Infrastructure built around a single commodity remains dependent on that commodity’s production cycle. Infrastructure designed as a shared freight platform can serve agriculture, mining, manufacturing, containers, petrochemicals and international trade long after the original cargo has changed.   Argentina’s recent regulatory changes could also support that transformation. Decree 748/2026 broadened the RIGI investment regime’s definition of railway construction to include the renewal, replacement, transformation and development of existing infrastructure, as well as associated logistics nodes, dry ports, cargo transfer centres and railway yards. The decree does not guarantee that any particular railway will be built, but it potentially improves the framework for private investment in infrastructure whose value extends beyond a single project. This is where Vaca Muerta becomes more than an energy story. Rail, ports, coastal shipping and trans-Andean connections should not necessarily be viewed as competing solutions. They can become components of the same logistics system.   The opportunity is therefore not simply to build a better supply chain for Vaca Muerta. It is to use its exceptional freight demand as the initial economic justification for infrastructure serving the wider economy.      The shale industry may have provided what many infrastructure proposals had been missing for decades: an anchor cargo. The question now is whether Argentina can turn that cargo into a network. If it does, Vaca Muerta’s most enduring legacy may not be the oil or the gas. It may be the freight infrastructure that finally connects Argentina’s productive regions, and its Atlantic and Pacific gateways.

The more interesting question is not how much sand Argentina will move by 2028, but what these corridors carry afterward.