The resource is not in doubt

Start with the physics, because the physics is the least contested part of this story.

Chiodini et al. (2014) measured the advective thermal energy release of the Domuyo hydrothermal system at 1.1 ± 0.2 GW. That is the second-highest measured advective heat flux of any hydrothermal system on Earth, after Yellowstone.

Be precise about what that sentence ranks. It ranks measured heat output, among systems somebody has actually gone and measured. It does not say Domuyo is the second-largest hydrothermal system by area, or by volume, or by anything else. Guides that render this as "the second-largest geothermal field in the world after Yellowstone" have upgraded a careful measurement into a superlative the paper does not support.

The rest of the numbers are consistent with a serious high-enthalpy resource. Equilibrium fluid temperatures of 190–230 °C. A reservoir estimated above 200–240 °C, with a geothermometric figure of 220 °C, at a depth of 800–1,000 m. Surface manifestations running 60–97 °C — Los Tachos, El Humazo, Las Olletas, La Bramadora, Aguas Calientes — concentrated on the western slope. The target sits roughly 35 km north of Varvarco.

The heat source is a shallow silicic magma body. The plumbing is reactivated basement faulting, not a volcanic conduit — Galetto et al. (2021) describe the complex as a porphyritic granitic–dioritic stock pushed up through an old fault-bounded crustal block. Structural control of the geothermal field comes from the basement, not from the volcano.

This is a good resource. That is not the question.

The project, as the province describes it

The project belongs to ADI-NQN SEP, the provincial investment agency, with a power purchase agreement envisaged with EPEN, the provincial utility. Three drilling targets have been identified. The build is staged: a 5 MW pilot module first, then expansion toward a prefeasibility potential of 90–100 MWe.

Quoted cost is USD 35 million for the project, plus a separate USD 40 million requested for a transmission line running from Chos Malal to the Domuyo base. Export to Chile has been floated.

The Inter-American Development Bank funded the social and environmental studies — approximately USD 200,000, awarded to RINA, starting 14 November 2022. Note the scope. The study covers the whole corridor from Varvarco to Aguas Calientes. Not the wellhead. The corridor.

Hold that detail. It is the one that matters most for anyone who walks here.

Continue reading Cerro Domuyo — the hinge of Patagonia, not the roof of it →

The consultation, and a date that does not agree with itself

A first public consultation was held in Varvarco, at the Municipal Gymnasium.

Two of our own research lenses disagree on the year. One dates it 2 February 2024. The other dates it 2 February 2025, citing ADI-NQN's own consultation page. Same day, same month, same venue, one year apart.

We have not resolved it. Rather than pick the more convenient date and present it as settled, here it is as a conflict. The event happened; the year is uncertain by one. If you need the date for anything load-bearing, go to ADI-NQN directly.

Where it stands, as of 5 March 2026

Still pre-drilling.

ADI-NQN president Leandro López presented the project at GEOLAC 2026. A consultancy has been contracted to update the conceptual model with a 3D magnetotelluric inversion and define the exploratory target. That is a geophysics contract, not a rig contract.

Progress is stated as conditional on "consolidación del financiamiento, obtención de licencia social, y culminación de la etapa de perforación exploratoria profunda" — financing, social licence, and completion of deep exploratory drilling. An international tender for the 90/100 MWe modules follows only if drilling results are positive.

No exploratory well has been reported drilled.

That is the whole story in one line. The first potential estimate for Domuyo dates to 1984. Forty-two years later, the project is contracting a study to decide where to put the first deep hole. Every stage of the plan is downstream of a well that does not exist.

There is no organised opposition in the accessible record either. That is absence of evidence, not evidence of absence — the socio-environmental study is precisely the instrument that would surface opposition, and it has not been published.

The road is the thing, not the plant

Here is the reframe.

If you are worried about what industrial energy development does to the Domuyo landscape, a power plant is the wrong object to watch. A 5 MW pilot module is a small footprint. It is also, on current evidence, several years and one successful deep well away.

What arrives before a plant is infrastructure: an access road capable of carrying a drilling rig, drill pads at three targets, and a transmission line. The BID-funded study covers the Varvarco–Aguas Calientes corridor because that is the corridor the project needs. Anyone who has driven RP43 past Varvarco knows what is there now — consolidated ripio, narrow bridges, no fuel for 120 km, and a road surface that is itself the main filter on how many people reach this place.

That filter is already being dismantled, for reasons unconnected to geothermal. The 18 km Las Ovejas–Varvarco paving contract was tendered explicitly to unlock the Centro Termal Domuyo, Colomichicó, Los Bolillos, Cajón de Atreuco and La Puntilla. It was 25.22% complete in April 2026. YPF breaks ground on Varvarco's first service station in October–November 2026.

Tourism access and drilling access want the same road. They are not in tension over whether it gets built. They are in tension over what else travels on it.

Category VI is not an oversight

The protected area is the Área Natural Protegida Provincial del Sistema Domuyo, created by Decreto Provincial 587/89 — 23 February 1989, 92,838 ha, spanning Departamentos Minas and Chos Malal. (Three decree numbers circulate in secondary sources; 587/89 is the one carried by the CFI management plan, SiFAP and the OSM boundary relation independently. Take 587/89.)

Its IUCN classification is Category VI — managed resource protected area. That is a category that permits sustainable resource use.

This is the quiet centre of the whole question. A stricter category would have foreclosed the geothermal argument in 1989. Category VI does not. The protected area and the concession-stage energy project coexist inside the same landscape because the protected area was written to allow exactly that.

It also explains why there is no national park here. Lanín and Nahuel Huapi were carved out of national-territory land. Domuyo is a provincial instrument on provincial fiscal land, in a department where over 93% of pastoral occupation is untitled, and the province's own energy agency holds the project. Neuquén has never ceded this ground to Parques Nacionales, and has an obvious reason not to.

The management plan is being rewritten in 2026. A public working session in Varvarco brought together the Ministerio de Turismo, the Subsecretaría de Cambio Climático, the Dirección Provincial de ANP, guardaparques, CEAN, Recursos Hídricos, E.Pro.Te.N. — the provincial thermal-baths agency — and the comisiones de fomento de Varvarco–Invernada Vieja and Coyuco–Cochico. Stated aims include uso público and protection of vertientes and ambientes termales. The provincial environment ministry describes the process as participatory; its page carries no publication date.

Anything written now about what is and is not permitted inside the ANP should carry a rules-under-revision caveat. Including this article.

Consultation is the open question, and we are not going to fill it in

No documented Mapuche or Pehuenche prior consultation process under ILO Convention 169, specific to Domuyo, was found. No documented conflict either. Both of those are gaps in the record, and they are not the same as a finding.

Neuquén has a live precedent. In May 2025 the Lof Kaxipayiñ filed an administrative challenge arguing that concessions cannot be granted without prior consultation. That is Vaca Muerta, not Domuyo. Different territory, different project, different community. It establishes that the argument is being made in this province. It establishes nothing about this mountain, and extrapolating it here would be inventing a conflict that the record does not show.

There is a harder limitation to state. It could not be confirmed that any Mapuche community with registered personería jurídica is seated in Departamento Minas. INAI's public community dataset 404s at every endpoint we tried. The Confederación Mapuche de Neuquén's northern zonal council, Zonal Pikunce, names communities seated at Colipilli and Chorriaca — neither in Minas. Millaín Currical, often attached to Domuyo in press copy, is based at Caviahue-Copahue; its veranadas reach north, its seat does not.

So this article does not name any community as being "of the Domuyo", and neither should anyone else without a named lof and a source. The territorial bodies that actually appear in the Tier-1 record, at the management-plan table, are the comisiones de fomento. That is what can be documented. Asserting the absence of communities would be as wrong as inventing their presence.

The land underneath, which nobody holds on paper

The reason consultation is not a procedural footnote here is tenure.

Nicolás Padín, writing in Estudios (CEA-UNC, 2019), found that 93.41% of criancero land occupation in Departamento Minas is in "situación irregular" on fiscal state land, against 89.71% province-wide. Multi-generational occupation. No title.

Padín also traces who the crianceros are. They descend from Pehuenche and Mapuche groups who took up pastoralism in the 18th century, and were then pushed through what he calls "un largo y tortuoso proceso de sublimación étnica, nacional y de clase" — distanced from Pehuenche and Mapuche identity, then from Chilean identity, arriving in the official narrative as criollos y argentinos.

That process is why the tenure question and the indigenous-consultation question are the same question wearing different paperwork.

The paperwork got worse. Ley 26.160, which suspended evictions and ordered a territorial survey of indigenous communities, was repealed by DNU 1083/2024, published 10 December 2024 — ending the eviction suspension nearly a year before its last extension expired. In eighteen years, only about half of communities had completed a survey. Since the repeal, RENACI has been eliminated and the Consejo de Participación Indígena deactivated. INAI Resolutions 139/2025 and 140/2025 reduced the mapped territories of the Rams (Catan Lil) and Quinchao (Picunches) communities in Neuquén, after complaints from private landowners.

Set that against a project that needs a corridor across fiscal land where 93% of the people using it have no title. Nobody is being evicted from Domuyo. The point is narrower and duller: the instrument that would have documented who holds what, before a concession moved, was switched off.

Tourism here is not diversification

The last piece of context is economic, and it is bleak.

Departamento Minas is 6,225 km² with 9,267 inhabitants (2022 census, up 53.09% on 2010) — about 1.5 people per square kilometre. The base economy is transhumant goat herding: roughly 1,500 criancero families in Neuquén moving about half a million goats across 3,800 km of routes, mostly over provincial fiscal land. The terms of trade are what they sound like: a young goat at ARS 65,000 buys about three 25-kg sacks of flour.

Mining was tried and it failed. CORMINE granted Minera Andacollo Gold SA (MAGSA) a 20-year usufruct in October 1998. MAGSA abandoned the deposit and went bankrupt three years later. As recently as 31 March 2026, decree 455/2026 assigned CORMINE ARS 354,930,331 to cover April–June salaries for MAGSA's former workforce. The province is still paying the wages of a mine that stopped producing a quarter of a century ago.

(A caution, because guides get this wrong: Carmen de Andacollo in Chile's Coquimbo region is a different place with an active gold project. Do not conflate them.)

So when the province paves a road and licenses mountain guides, that is not a portfolio being diversified. It is the replacement for an extractive economy that already collapsed here once. Varvarco posted 76% occupancy in January 2026, up 30 percentage points year on year — the strongest growth in the region.

And the corridor that would carry a transmission line from Chos Malal to the Domuyo base is the same corridor that carries the visitors. Varvarco to Aguas Calientes. One road, two futures, and one of them has been about to start drilling since 1984.

📚17 Sources
  • Chiodini et al., "Geochemistry and thermal energy release of the Domuyo geothermal system", Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 274:71–77 (2014) — read via abstract and secondary summaries; ScienceDirect returned 403, no accessible URL
  • Proyecto Geotérmico Domuyo, Piensa Geotermia — https://www.piensageotermia.com/proyecto-geotermico-domuyo-potencial-geotermico-de-alta-temperatura-en-neuquen-argentina/
  • ADI-NQN, sector geotérmico Domuyo — http://www.web.adinqn.gov.ar/sectores/energeticos/geotermico/domuyo/
  • ADI-NQN, primera consulta pública Domuyo — https://www.web.adinqn.gov.ar/primera_consulta_domuyo/
  • Galetto et al. (2021), CONICET — https://ri.conicet.gov.ar/handle/11336/178097
  • Actualización del plan de manejo del ANP Domuyo, Ministerio de Ambiente de Neuquén — https://ambiente.neuquen.gov.ar/avanza-la-actualizacion-del-plan-de-manejo-del-area-natural-protegida-domuyo-con-participacion-local/
  • Nicolás Padín, Estudios (CEA-UNC, 2019) — https://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1852-15682019000100007
  • DNU 1083/2024, Boletín Oficial, 10 Dec 2024 — https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/317918/20241210
  • CELS on the repeal of the Ley 26.160 regime — https://www.cels.org.ar/web/2024/12/derogacion-ley-territorio-indigena-26160/
  • Crianceros trashumantes del norte neuquino, Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial — https://www.argentina.gob.ar/cultura/manifestaciones-del-patrimonio-cultural-inmaterial/neuquen/crianceros-trashumantes-de-la
  • Familias crianceras del norte neuquino, Agencia Tierra Viva — https://agenciatierraviva.com.ar/familias-crianceras-del-norte-neuquino-pilares-de-la-soberania-alimentaria-rehenes-de-una-economia-que-los-maltrata/
  • Crianceros y tierra fiscal, Estudios Cea n.41 — https://www.scielo.org.ar/pdf/ecea/n41/n41a07.pdf
  • Aporte a CORMINE para sueldos de exmineros de Andacollo, Río Negro — https://www.rionegro.com.ar/politica/con-condiciones-aprueban-un-aporte-a-cormine-para-pagar-sueldos-de-los-exmineros-de-andacollo/
  • Licitación del asfalto RP43 Varvarco–Las Ovejas, DPV Neuquén — https://www.dpvneuquen.gov.ar/licitan-el-asfalto-de-la-ruta-provincial-43-entre-varvarco-y-las-ovejas/
  • Avance de la pavimentación de la RP43, Neuquén Informa, 16 May 2026 — https://www.neuqueninforma.gob.ar/noticias/2026/05/16/257775-supera-el-25por_ciento-de-ejecucion-la-obra-de-pavimentacion-de-la-ruta-provincial-43
  • Primera estación de servicio en Varvarco, Río Negro — https://www.rionegro.com.ar/sociedad/varvarco-dejara-de-estar-a-120-kilometros-de-la-primera-estacion-de-servicio-en-el-norte-neuquino-4650833/
  • El turismo en el Alto Neuquén, Neuquén Informa, 28 Feb 2026 — https://www.neuqueninforma.gob.ar/noticias/2026/02/28/255362-el-turismo-en-el-alto-neuquen-esta-de-moda