Argentina has traditionally had the highest per capita consumption of petrochemicals products in Latin America, although the petrochemical industry is modestly sized in international terms. Chemical majors such as Dow Chemical and Repsol YPF began investing heavily in the mid-1990s, which helped the Argentine industry recuperate after a period of relatively slow growth. However, since then, investment has slowed considerably and the industry has fallen behind global trends and the renationalisation of YPF in 2012 caused controversy and legal disputes, yet did not result in any improvement in feedstock availability for the petrochemicals industry. President Mauricio Macri is pursuing a more pragmatic and business-friendly period of policymaking, encouraging greater investment into unconventional assets, primarily by larger, more cash-rich producers. This is stimulating downstream investments with the hope that the country's large untapped gas reserves will help yield sufficient feedstock for a new world-scale petrochemicals complex.

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