Profile · Reservoirs, business development and data · Buenos Aires
Reservoir engineering, business development, and the AI tools for those decisions
A shift has begun in how this industry works: AI is reaching the decisions of exploration, production and new business. I come from the side that makes those calls — thirteen years of simulation and geomodelling at Pluspetrol and Tecpetrol across four countries, then corporate development — and I build the tools: ten are live on this site.
What I do
Where I can be useful
Data and AI for decisions
Dashboards, models and agents over public data or the client's own: what competitors are doing, what an asset is worth, where a bid makes sense. The ten live on this site show the full method, number by number.
Reservoir engineering
Full-field simulation and geomodelling, reserves progression, development planning, forecasting and waterflood surveillance. Several years as a specialist, working in Petrel, Eclipse and CMG.
Project development
Asset valuation, data rooms, production forecasts and the economics of an acquisition decision. At the other end of the cycle, taking a new project through to the decision to invest or not.
The thread across all of it: language-model interpretability — a paper under review at BlackboxNLP 2026 — and the incident registry for Argentina's energy sector. Both answer the same question: which tasks can already be handed to an AI system, and which cannot yet.
Who with
A network convened per project
The demos on this site I built alone, and that is the scale of a demo: real work takes more hands. For that there is a network of specialists that activates as the case demands — economic geology, geophysics, remote sensing, reservoir and facilities engineering, software development, cybersecurity. The names are not on this page because the relationship is per project, not payroll: each proposal states who joins, in what role and why.
Track record
Where I worked, and on what
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Since 2026
Engineer
Podeley · technical solutions for oil, gas and mining · Buenos Aires
Dashboards, models and agents built on public data and on the client's own, for market intelligence, opportunity framing and decision support. Ten of those tools are published and can be opened from this site. Alongside that I research language-model interpretability, which is where the judgement comes from about when an AI system can carry an operating decision and when it cannot.
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2022–2026
Energy Transition Engineer, corporate development
Pluspetrol · Buenos Aires
Appraising new-business projects through to the decision to invest or not, and shelving them in time when the economics did not hold. Most of it was sustainable aviation fuel, with UOP, Technip, LanzaJet and AFRY; we reached conceptual engineering and none went to execution. What stayed with me is the judgement, not the technology: in new energy the bottleneck is rarely the process, it is who signs the offtake. There were also projects to create gas demand: ammonia and urea for export off both coasts, and gas solutions for frac fleets.
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2019–2022
Reservoir Engineer, new technologies and global reserves
Pluspetrol · Buenos Aires
Global reserves progression and asset appraisals, with the Ecuadorian fields still in the portfolio and the development of the Ichoa play in Bolivia. On the new side, underground gas storage and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.
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2014–2019
Reservoir Engineer
Tecpetrol · Buenos Aires, with assets in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia
Tecpetrol's technical representative in the Camisea consortium, blocks 88 and 56: I migrated and maintained the full-field simulation model of a giant gas condensate field, and led the integrated asset modelling study across GAP, PROSPER and MBAL. Alongside that, development models for Pendare in Colombia and mature waterflooded fields at Libertador-Atacapi and Shushufindi in Ecuador. I was also co-creator of Well Expert, the well-data web application the company ended up running on, and the geosciences focal point for that rollout.
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2008–2014
Reservoir Engineer
Pluspetrol · Neuquén basin and corporate
Reservoir engineering for the El Porvenir area: studies, reserves progression, development plan, forecasts, waterflood surveillance and workover design. At Centenario, surveillance and more than 40 interventions, with field training on rigs, stimulation and production. In corporate engineering, valuation support to business development and the integrated study of block 1AB in the Marañón basin. Out of that desk came the bid for Petroandina Resources, which ended in the purchase of its share of Argentine assets for over US$ 300 million.
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2016–2021, alongside
Instructor and researcher
Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires · Petroleum Engineering Department
Five years teaching Petroleum Project Appraisal, and two as a researcher at the Reservoir Simulation Research Center. Two publications came out of it, on applying reservoir simulation techniques to lithium brine salars — which is why this site carries mining demos.
Before that: research analyst for an investment bank's equity team, and an internship at Baker Oil Tools. The full detail is in the CV.
Education and tools
Petroleum engineer and industrial engineer, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires. Stanford's Energy Innovation and Emerging Technologies program. Exchange in computer science at INSA Lyon.
Petrel, Eclipse, CMG, GAP, PROSPER and MBAL on the reservoir side; Python and GIS on the data side. Native Spanish, full professional English, working French.
Contact
Contact
If you have an asset, a project or a team where some of this is needed, email me and we can talk it through.
matias@podeley.ar · Buenos Aires