Energy and People: Building the Teams Behind Tomorrow’s Power Projects

Episode Overview

The world wants exponentially more electricity, and the industry that builds power projects doesn’t have enough people to deliver it. James Wiseman has spent 25 years getting energy megaprojects over the line (decommissioning, deepwater and subsea, Arctic developments, Tesla’s lithium refinery, and now Alaska’s most famous pipeline), and he walks Orion through what actually has to change: the stage gate gives way to a stream of activities, construction learns to behave like manufacturing, and the project manager becomes a coach. His first principles for scale never waver: good plans, and good people.

Episode Timeline

The conversation as it unfolded: eight chapters across the show’s four-act arc. The strip maps each chapter’s share of the runtime; click any block to jump to its chapter. Timestamps are approximate.

Who carried the mic

The Guest · James Wiseman

James Wiseman

Special Projects & Portfolio Group Manager, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company · 25+ years in energy megaprojects

Anchorage, Alaska, United States

Energy MegaprojectsDeepwater & SubseaArctic ProjectsLithium & RenewablesModular Fabrication

James has spent more than 25 years in the upstream energy business, leading teams through every stage of major projects: appraisal to startup, greenfield and brownfield. He started in decommissioning, as he tells it on the show: three years as a project engineer with Winmar Consulting Services (1998–2001), planning the tear-down and reuse of offshore platforms and pipelines. He then pivoted to deepwater: eight years at INTECSEA commissioning pipelines on projects like BP’s Holstein and Thunder Horse, three as Hess’s subsea engineering advisor, and eight at Noble Energy, where he ran the Gunflint development in the Gulf of Mexico before leading engineering for exploration and new ventures. When Chevron acquired Noble in 2020 he stayed on as a senior project manager for the Eastern Mediterranean and the Leviathan gas development, then went north as Pikka Project Director and Senior Vice President of Santos’s Alaska business unit: the Arctic mega-project chapter he credits on air to “Oil Search and Santos” (his bio records it under Santos), and where he and Orion first worked together. From there: Tesla, integrating the teams building the company’s first lithium refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas (2023–24); a stretch of renewable-energy consulting; and, since early 2025, Anchorage: Special Projects & Portfolio Group Manager at Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, the operator of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He holds a B.S. and an M.S. in civil engineering from UC Berkeley (structural, offshore and construction engineering) and speaks here in a personal capacity.

“Projects are built by people, a hundred percent. They don’t build themselves.”James Wiseman · on the show, ~42:50

The path, in his own telling

Sequence from the conversation (~0:39–2:50 and ~57:45–59:00), with dates and employers confirmed against James’s LinkedIn bio. The full role-by-role record is charted below.

Career journey

Role-by-role from James’s LinkedIn bio. The renewable-energy consulting he mentions on air sits in the gap between Tesla and Alyeska (mid-2024 → early 2025); the Arctic chapter he credits on air to “Oil Search and Santos” appears on the bio under Santos.

The Host · Orion Matthews

Orion Matthews

Founder, Queryon · Host, The Major Project Podcast · PMO data & analytics

Eugene, Oregon, United States

Project Controls ReportingPMO Data AnalyticsCapital PortfoliosAI in ProjectsPower BI

Orion is an award-winning programmer, entrepreneur and technology executive who has spent the last decade in the engine room of major capital projects. He founded Queryon in Washington, D.C. in 2015 with a focus on data analytics and software for the construction industry, starting with bellwether client BP, whose project-controls solutions his team deployed globally, from the North Sea to Azerbaijan to Houston. Today he's a recognized expert in PMO data analytics and project-controls reporting, serving billion-dollar portfolios for owners including BP, Santos, Balfour Beatty and Turner & Townsend, a regular speaker at major industry conferences on AI and analytics in capital projects, and the host of this show.

Riding the Bull: Scale & the End of the Stage Gate

Orion opens with the question the whole energy world is asking: how do you scale fast, and how do you do it right? James starts by dismantling the comfort blanket (the stage-gate process the industry spent 25 years perfecting), and lands on why Tesla’s lithium refinery ran on a different clock entirely.

“Getting a project over the line is really, really hard. They call it riding the bull: you’re trying to stay on the bull and keep the project on track for just eight seconds. People fall off all the time, and people always ask: why did you fall off the bull? Eight seconds, it’s not that long. Can’t you get this done? It’s just tremendously hard.”James Wiseman · ~4:20

1. The stage gate’s promise, punctured: “You just follow these steps and your project is gonna go great, right? And it’s just not the case, because projects are planned and built by people.” ~3:50
2. “There’s no big red easy button that you can push that says: execute project”: permits, financing and sanction take years before anyone gets to go fast. ~5:35
3. Blurring the gates: “I just think of it as a stream of activities now… the engineering phase is not necessarily to deliver the best 100% detailed design package; it needs to be sequenced to order materials and keep materials flowing into the project.” ~7:55
4. Orion maps waterfall-to-agile from software onto stage gates, and asks whether energy will accept a cost range instead of a final number. ~8:20
5. Why the old model can’t just be exported: “They tried to do renewable energy projects like oil and gas projects. And who’s gonna hire an oil company and give them money to do a project that old-fashioned way? It’s just not gelling.” ~9:35
6. The first-mover prize: “The prize is so big to be the first mover that it really isn’t as important to have a perfectly cost-controlled project as it is to be first”: LNG Canada’s first cargo as the live example. ~11:00
7. The chapter’s landing: “How do you scale? You just need to have good plans and good people, that’s my first principles.” ~12:00

The Energy Mix: Solar Math, Storage & the Lithium Race

James is passionate about renewables, “and it’s not because I’m an evangelist.” It’s arithmetic: the world needs vastly more electricity, and every option is needed at once. This chapter is the episode’s field guide: solar’s produce-three-times rule, the battery-storage land grab, the majors moving into lithium, and why procurement is the bottleneck nobody can plan around.

“We need so much more electricity right now: we’re like a cave diver, and we’ve gone all the way into the cave, and we might not have enough air to make it back out again.”James Wiseman · ~13:10

1. Rate-payer politics in one line: “If our electric bills start going up ’cause of these data centers, people are gonna be pissed.” ~13:25
2. The majors move on lithium: Exxon first in Texas and Arkansas, Chevron announcing the week of recording, with a former Noble colleague of James’s heading it up. “It’s a very small world in the energy business.” ~14:45
3. “We need everything on the list”: intermittent wind and sun on top, base load underneath: nuclear, geothermal, natural gas combined cycle. “If you look at electricity demand curves, we just need everything.” ~17:10
4. A solar farm through oil-and-gas eyes: “Instead of drilling and completing 16 wells with hundreds of frack stages each, you’ve gotta get really good at planning and installing thousands of solar panels”, and utility-scale solar is priced “down to the penny” per kilowatt-hour. ~18:50
5. The grid queue: high-voltage connections are “extremely high demand and long lead time… a grid tie could take five or six years to get all the way through to where you can actually close the switch.” ~21:20
6. Procurement as the bottleneck: transformers and electrical components where “demand is outstripping supply,” tariffs reshuffling order books overnight: “the companies that aren’t getting tariffed, everybody wants to buy from, so their lead time just went through the roof. To plan and execute, you want predictability.” ~22:10
7. The Megapack example: tractor-trailer-sized batteries, ~1.3 MWh each: “when the administration changed, those things went in high demand. If you didn’t have your order placed, it was pretty tough.” ~23:50

Hot Rocks: Enhanced Geothermal

“It’s super hot right now, that was a good pun.” James isn’t a geothermal specialist and says so; he’s an energy-projects lifer who has studied it because it checks every box: base-load power, no CO2 at the point of production, and a skills profile lifted straight from America’s unconventional oil playbook. This chapter doubles as the episode’s best career signpost for oil-field talent.

“It has all of the makings for a really good energy system for us, and it uses the skills we’ve developed in this country over the last 50 years in the oil business, especially the last 15 in unconventional. And it’s base-load energy.”James Wiseman · ~24:30

1. “What is the coolest renewable energy mix right now? It’s one that’s close to oil and gas but produces energy without producing CO2. It’s got all the ingredients; I think it’s really gonna take off.” ~26:30
2. Who to watch: an enhanced-geothermal developer in Houston that has “attracted a bunch of interest, a bunch of capital”: Fervo Energy, whose EGS projects James points listeners to. ~26:10
3. Where the heat is: the Pacific Rim’s ring of fire, and, “believe it or not,” even the Permian gets pretty darn hot when you get down. ~26:50
4. The career doorway: reservoir-style thinking ports over: “instead of looking for oil… this is about heat and heat flow, and what the equipment and drilling will cost. It really ports over a lot of the people from the oil field.” ~28:15
5. His 10,000-foot career advice, delivered here: “If you like science and math, go to college, become an electrical engineer. If you don’t wanna go to college, become an electrician. We need those people so badly in this country. The world needs them.” ~29:15

AI & Modular: Turning Construction into Manufacturing

“Watts for bots” gets a laugh. Then the conversation turns serious: AI as a way to find what’s going wrong on a thousand-person project, software that should be routing pipe automatically, and modularization as the fifty-year answer to construction’s flat productivity curve.

“Improvement in construction efficiency over the last, just pick 50 years, it’s not improved a lot. And manufacturing has improved dramatically. That’s one of the things about modularization that’s cool: turning part of the project into manufacturing.”James Wiseman · ~34:15

1. Why modules exist at all: “You lift a 10,000-ton module onto a floating platform… you build it one place, you bring it there, you put it onto the platform, because you can’t get the people there.” ~35:15
2. When to decide: “This is definitely the planning phase… and modularization isn’t gonna help you if every yard that builds modules is chockablock full building LNG plants.” ~37:40
3. The honest downside: “A lot of times you have to ship a module before it’s done”: seasonal windows, permit clocks, and the extra structural steel you pay to lift the thing. ~38:25
4. The business case, sketched: 60,000 barrels a day ≈ 20 big modules, or three super-mega modules offshore: “you look at the cost and how much faster you can do it, and there’s usually an immediate value addition there.” ~39:10
5. The caveat that shows his stakeholder instincts: an all-overseas module strategy can leave “five full-time jobs to hook ’em up” locally: “there’s intrinsic value in having the local people involved and invested in the success of the project.” ~40:20

Coach, Not Commander

Orion sets this chapter up with a first: James is the only guest so far he has actually worked under. He tells the story of a crisis meeting James walked into and calmly de-escalated (“let’s just pause and make sure we do this right”), then hands him the mic on how to actually lead the teams behind tomorrow’s power projects.

“I don’t believe the traditional command-and-control leadership style is a great way to work going forward. People have lots of choices about where they wanna work, and people wanna be a valuable member of a team. The project manager is almost like a coach at this point: if you’ve got a really good team, you’re just helping them drive toward the goal line.”James Wiseman · ~43:10

1. The line that anchors the episode: “Engineers aren’t always viewed as the most empathetic people… but projects are built by people, a hundred percent. They don’t build themselves.” ~42:45
2. Careers inside a five-year build: “There are just very few people coming into the workforce that wanna do the same thing for five years. Can you imagine?” So he moves people around as phases change. ~45:45
3. Optimism as a job requirement: “People would never do projects if they weren’t optimists… when people work together as a team, there’s really nothing they can’t do.” ~46:00
4. How engineers learn the soft skills: not from a book: “ask a lot of questions… that’s how you find out what’s important to everyone.” And the humbling rule: “a lot of times the best technical solution is not the best overall solution.” ~47:50
5. Stakeholders decide success: “If you successfully complete a project and meet all your targets, but the people interacting with or benefiting from your project aren’t happy, you may not be successful.” ~48:20
6. The hallmark: “You want everybody, that’s worked on the project, that’s benefiting from it, that lives nearby, to be proud of that thing you did. That is your hallmark of success.” ~50:50
7. The Tesla melting pot: Sparks battery-factory veterans, Exxon chemical-plant operators, upstream people like him: “the key to success is being willing to learn how the other people do things.” His own lesson: “we’re not making high-pressure flammable fluids, we’re making lithium hydroxide. Nothing was gonna blow up. I learned that by talking to everybody.” ~53:20

The Next Generation & Moore’s Law for Energy

The advice act, and the episode’s most personal stretch. James talks to the students and career-changers directly: engineers are problem solvers, the energy business has more problems than people, and the way in is to talk to the people doing the work. Then a question about his own start reignites the conversation into a closing riff on why panels and batteries keep doubling.

“Engineers are problem solvers, and there are so many problems facing humans and the planet right now. Having enough energy is one of ’em, but there are so many other ones… If you don’t know what you wanna do, but you like solving technical problems, there are so many opportunities out there.”James Wiseman · ~55:15

1. The talent-market riddle: “Electricians are in high demand and nobody wants to become an electrician… there’s not that meeting of supply and demand for talent right now. Finding out what you’re curious about is probably more valuable than any training class or job board.” ~57:10
2. Why solar and batteries keep accelerating: unlike wind turbines (big mechanical devices with limited headroom), “with microelectronics, solar panels and batteries, there really isn’t a limit there… If you look at a solar panel from five years ago, size, cost, output, and compare it to one today, it’s amazing.” ~1:01:45
3. The camper-battery proof point: an LFP battery that “used to cost a thousand dollars, big and heavy, now $300, small and light. And that has happened really quickly.” ~1:02:20
4. The panel-swap trick early adopters are discovering: same roof, same rack, same size panels: “unplug your old panels, bolt down your new panels, and you can double your production. It makes economic sense.” ~1:03:50
5. The honest physics check: “A gallon of diesel fuel just kicks the butt of every other kind of energy storage right now… are we ever gonna have an electric boat or an electric aircraft? That energy density may just never be there.” ~1:05:30
6. His definition of arrival: “When people don’t even notice what kind of energy they’re using is when you know it’s succeeding”: chargers on every corner, AAA already towing battery trailers to stranded EVs. ~1:06:30

Off-Grid, Critical Minerals & the Close

The wrap-up act refuses to wind down. James remembers a project he forgot to mention (Costco generating its own power because the grid can’t keep up), and the thread unravels into the episode’s final frontier: the materials underneath the whole transition, the dirty and clean ways to refine them, and why he thinks Alaska is sitting on the opportunity.

“Costco is building so fast, they could not get enough electricity to their facilities. So they just said: we’re gonna generate our own where we can… they just can’t do that five-year wait to get a five-megawatt electricity connection. When you’re not even connected to the grid anymore, then you know you’re winning.”James Wiseman · ~1:10:50

1. Orion’s image for where the grid is heading: from one massive controlled system to distributed generation: “we all have mitochondria in our body; that’s probably where we’ll end up on a civilization-wide scale.” ~1:11:50
2. Direct lithium extraction and modern absorption media (“a really cool field right now to get into”), explained via activated carbon in ninety seconds. ~1:18:00
3. From a presentation he’d just given: search the critical-minerals list: “everyone on the list is found in Alaska.” ~1:15:20
4. The onshoring case: “If you were to throw down a big curtain at the Pacific and a big curtain at the Atlantic, we would have trouble building what we need… We’re smart, we’ve got people that wanna do it, we just need the drive to do it ourselves. It’s a little bit of a dirty job, and we should want to do some dirty jobs like this. It’s gonna be good for our country and good for our kids.” ~1:21:30
5. Orion’s counterweight from Oregon: lakes full of 19th-century tailings and long-gone companies: the remediation cost nobody modeled. “You don’t wanna socialize those losses when there’s a better option.” James: “A hundred percent behind that.” ~1:19:50
6. The close: “I’m really easy to find on LinkedIn: there aren’t a lot of James Wisemans on there. I actually do look like my picture, which is sometimes rare.” ~1:23:20

The Big Ideas

Three ideas carry the episode. Sketched here the way a project-services team would whiteboard them.

Bookshelf & Links

Everything recommended or pointed to in the episode, plus where to find the people and the show.

Quote Bank

The best on-the-record lines, gathered in one filterable place. “Highlight” marks the lines most worth scrubbing back for; quotes lightly condensed, timestamps approximate.