Marcos Bulgheroni’s personal bet on taking Argentine gas to the world
The CEO of PAE comes from an oil family, took command after his father’s death and chose the harder path: selling Argentine energy abroad.
There was one early morning when Marcos Bulgheroni waited for a call that never came. He was convinced that, at three in the morning, someone would wake him up to tell him that the gas agreement with Europe had fallen through or that the price had to be renegotiated. The negotiation with the German state-owned company SEFE had been, in his words, quite complicated. The phone did not ring. The contract remained in place, and the CEO of Pan American Energy (PAE) now tells it as one of the proofs that taking the risk was worth it.
That willingness to take a chance is new in the family history. Bulgheroni, born in 1972, grew up inside an oil dynasty and reached the company’s leadership through a painful path: the death of his father, Carlos Bulgheroni, in 2016. Since then, he has shared the group’s leadership with his uncle, Alejandro Bulgheroni.
From Bridas to the leadership of the group
The surname became tied to oil much earlier. Bridas was founded in 1949 by his grandfather as a supplier of flanges and electric pumps for the industry, and over the years it became one of the sector’s largest independent operators. Bulgheroni is executive vice president and vice chairman of Bridas Energy Holding, as well as group CEO of Pan American Energy Group (PAEG), the company based in Argentina with a presence in Bolivia, Mexico, Uruguay and Paraguay.
His earlier career took him abroad before he fully entered the energy business. He worked at Relativity Development Corporation, the Italian company Torno Internazionale and Begas Energy International, before joining Pan American Energy in 2012. In December 2017, after the integration of AXION energy with PAE, he became the group’s top executive. Italy, in fact, decorated him with the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity, a nod to his roots.
The fight he chose to take on
What distinguishes his management is the cause he embraces. Bulgheroni reviewed the industry’s starting point, when the depletion of conventional resources had the entire sector against the ropes. “There were existential problems,” he acknowledged. The way out he defended was not the comfortable one: betting on difficult and expensive solutions, supported by technology, and standing by the uncertainty until the model took hold. Convincing and inspiring others, he said, was part of the job.
That same stubbornness reappears in his export-oriented discourse. Bulgheroni speaks of “selling Argentina to the world” as if it were a personal motto, and not only a commercial objective for PAE. The anecdote about the statue in Berlin — a joke about the European officials who closed the purchase of Argentine gas and became heroes in their own country — captures his view: the country has something the rest of the world needs, and it has to go out and place it, even when the road is rough.
One foot in energy and another in public life
His figure extends beyond the oil company’s organizational chart. He is an adviser and member of the Energy Committee of the Argentine Council for International Relations (CARI), sits on the Board of Patrons of the University of San Andrés and participates in the Council of the Bishopric of the Diocese of San Isidro. During Argentina’s G20 presidency in 2018, he was co-chair of the Energy, Resource Efficiency and Sustainability task force of the B20, the forum that brings together global business leaders.
The latest sign of how far his commitment to the issue goes came through his pen: he wrote the foreword to Jorge Augusto Sapag’s book on Vaca Muerta and used that same platform to ask that the model he knows closely, after so many years, not be dismantled just as it is beginning to deliver results.