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Structure and cascade impact

The topology of the Argentine energy system is published. An attacker does not need to break into any control system to know what to hit: it is enough to read the same open data this map is built from, the gas network and the power grid, node by node.

Toggle the layers at top right. Gas: nodes and segments from the transmission-network snapshot. Power: high-voltage lines ≥220 kV colored by voltage level, and generation sized by installed capacity. Sources: the gas snapshot and the Energy Secretariat's datasets.

Two networks, one system

Gas and power are not separate sectors: they are a coupled machine. Gas feeds thermal generation, generation drives the high-voltage grid, and that grid feeds the compressor stations that push the gas back out. The map draws that circuit with 76 pipeline segments, 221 backbone lines (133 of them at 500 kV, the spine that keeps the interconnected system in sync), and 52 plants sized by capacity, from Yacyretá to Atucha to the thermal plants around Buenos Aires.

An attack that cuts one link can force another offline that the attacker never looked at.

How many nodes hang off each point

What makes a node critical is how much depends on it downstream. Walking the directed graph of the gas network along the direction of transport, each point gets a count of the nodes that would be isolated if it went out of service.

Orange, the nodes concentrating more than half the maximum; gold the middle; green low impact. Source: reachability over the directed graph of the gas transmission network.

The head of the Neuquén basin dominates the ranking, fed by Vaca Muerta. Loma La Lata leads with 29 nodes stranded downstream; next come San Sebastián (28) and Magallanes (26), the far-southern nodes that channel austral gas toward the center of the country. Three points concentrate the connectivity of the whole network, and they mark where an incident would cost the most.

The utilization the snapshot carries is not reliable

The same source includes a per-segment flow figure, and it carries known errors: some segments read above 100% of their capacity. That is why criticality here is measured by connectivity. Measuring it by throughput would be a different reading, and it needs a flow figure this snapshot does not provide.

What the map does not say

  • The coordinates of refineries, LNG terminals, and upstream hubs are approximate and public. There is no asset inventory and nothing that is not already published.
  • The gas snapshot is a photo taken on September 30, 2025. The reversal and the expansion around Perito Moreno / ex-GPNK are outside it, so the network shown is not today's.
  • The criticality ranking does not predict the outage each node would cause. The model assumes the snapshot's source → target direction and leaves out storage, linepack, and import routes (LNG, Bolivia), which would cushion the loss.
  • The cascade covers gas only. The power grid is meshed and its criticality reads better as installed capacity, which is what sizes the generation nodes on the map above.

This is the physical surface. The known incidents are what has already happened on it.