Every major project substantively discussed on the show: what it is, what it cost as cited on air, and the moment worth hearing, in a verbatim line from the person who was there. From a $10B urban forest in Riyadh to the data-center gold rush.
16 Mega projects9 Project typesFrom 12 episodes4 Continents · plus one global buildout
Greenfields at the edge of the map: a $20B Iraqi giant, the Arctic development two guests share, and the Colorado gas job where execution realism was born.
The storyOne of the largest oil and gas greenfield developments in the world: 100 to 150 wells feeding central processing facilities, its own 200 to 300 MW combined cycle power plant, a 3,000-person accommodation camp, and export shipping. Tarun Gohel worked owner-side project controls from Dubai while design ran in Italy, fabrication in South Korea, and contractors came from Turkey, Pakistan, and France. The episode digs into the 200-to-300-page project controls requirements document embedded in every contract, risk triggers agreed with the owner, and quarterly owner-side audits that surfaced true delay.
“When your project is impacted by $2 million, is it risky on a $20 billion CapEx? There has to be a threshold.”Tarun Gohel · Ep 005
The storySantos’s Arctic oil development is the show’s quiet through line: James Wiseman was Pikka project director and SVP of Santos’s Alaska business unit, the arctic chapter he credits on air to Oil Search and Santos, and Travis Arlitt’s current owner-side assignment is the Pikka Seawater Treatment Plant, planned from Kuala Lumpur with fabrication assurance in South Korean yards. Two guests, one Arctic megaproject, approached from the director’s chair and the planner’s trench.
“I’ve done the arctic stuff up here with Oil Search and Santos.”James Wiseman · Ep 003
Chevron Colorado Gas Development (compressor station and well pads)
Western Colorado, USA (off I-70 near Grand Junction)
North AmericaGas developmentOrigin story
The storyThe unnamed Chevron gas project where execution realism was born: a big compressor station, built-out well pads, interconnecting pipelines, roads and infrastructure. Travis Arlitt’s first progress system replaced three-week lookaheads that veteran crews ignored, and the bow-wave picture it produced had Chevron leadership firing up the corporate jet for an emergency site meeting, even as the same schedule was getting bad marks from the corporate audit. The origin story of the day one model.
“These guys had been building these facilities since before I was born, some of them. And here I was telling a pipeliner: hey, next week you gotta dig a trench and bed the pipe. They were looking at me with blank stares.”Travis Arlitt · Ep 013
City-scale building at Vision 2030 pace: a $10B urban forest run as a program of projects, and the giga-projects where 4D BIM keeps 66 subcontractors honest.
The storyThe Vision 2030 urban greening megaproject aiming to plant 7.5 million trees across Riyadh: neighborhoods, mosques, road corridors, wadis, and parks so large some contain stadiums. Jovita Stander served as its project controls director and insists it is a program, not a project, run through a P6-to-GIS integration in which every mosque, street segment, and green asset carries a GIS code tied back to schedule and cost. The KPIs go beyond tree count: canopy cover, dropping the city temperature one to two degrees, air quality, and irrigation from recycled water.
“They talk about the Green Riyadh project, but in actual fact the project is a program… The park is not just a park, it’s almost like a smart park. Some of the parks actually have a stadium.”Jovita Stander · Ep 002
The storyOmar Habib came up through a Saudi talent program straight onto projects of $3B and then $12B, a site four kilometers by three, and treats giga scale as normal for the Kingdom. The episode walks through what that scale demands in practice: a federated BIM model coordinating 66 subcontractors, 4D war rooms, crane placement simulations, and a mid-project rescue on a giga-project where the 3D model existed but nobody was using it.
“The first project I was trained on was 3 billion. The second project was 12 billion. And this kind of project in Saudi is really normal in terms of the numbers.”Omar Habib · Ep 009
The storyIsrael’s flagship offshore natural gas development and the subject of a full episode on risk management: risk workshops that actually work, Monte Carlo in practice, and building risk culture across contractor teams. It also threads through the show’s network: James Wiseman stayed on as Chevron’s senior project manager for the Eastern Mediterranean and the Leviathan gas development after the Noble Energy acquisition, per his episode brief.
The storyChevron’s Big Foot tension leg platform, where Travis Arlitt served as integration and commissioning planner out of Ingleside, Texas. On air it anchors his caution about density metrics: watching videos of the hull being built in South Korea convinced him that crews can achieve work densities that blow standard calcs out of the water, so forecast from demonstrated pace, not density assumptions.
“I was an integration planner for a Big Foot tension leg platform, and I remember watching the videos of the hull in South Korea. It’s like ants.”Travis Arlitt · Ep 013
The trains that made careers: the Angola assignment that answered a note card, and the Malaysian module yard where 30 minutes a week moved 20,000 tons.
The storyTravis Arlitt’s first international assignment and the payoff of the note card on his kitchen island that read: work for the owner, international. An urgent call from the Chevron group he had impressed in Colorado sent him rotational to Soyo, where he started OSBL, housing developments and roads, then filled in on the ISBL side when the lead planner’s back-to-back left. The break that set up a career across some of the biggest LNG jobs in the world.
“It was just so exhilarating to me to set foot in Africa for a big LNG.”Travis Arlitt · Ep 013
Western Australia (modules fabricated in Lumut, Malaysia)
Asia-PacificModule fabricationTwo trains
The storyChevron’s Wheatstone LNG is the setting for the episode’s centerpiece module-yard story. As Chevron’s quantity surveyor in the Malaysian fabrication yard, Travis Arlitt built a progress system whose A0-size plot of bow waves showed the train two module program was in dire straits despite a 10,000-line schedule saying otherwise. Bechtel leadership was pulled in and about 20,000 tons of train two modules were moved to another yard so train one could finish. He calls the system 30 to 45 minutes of work a week that shifted the trajectory of a whole LNG train.
“I worked probably 30 minutes a week, 45 minutes max, and I shifted the entire trajectory of that whole train of one of the biggest LNGs… That little component was worth two or three months of strategy.”Travis Arlitt · Ep 013
The storyThe rebuild of the refinery in Superior, Wisconsin, one of Travis Arlitt’s five flagship owner-side assignments and his return to megaprojects after an entrepreneurial detour. On air it illustrates how loaded the word planning is: the job carried five planners with different roles, and his contractor-fed progress system kept the strategic picture honest without adding to anyone’s workload.
“We had five different planners on this refinery job, and all of us had different roles. It’s such a loaded term.”Travis Arlitt · Ep 013
The storyNot a single project but the recurring mega-event class Grant Stead plans for a living: $500M spent in a 45-to-60-day window, staffing that jumps from a 200-person planning core to 4,000 to 6,000 people within a few shifts, and schedules deep enough to hand every welder a task on day one. The episode covers Corpus Christi Ship Channel refiners literally phoning each other to stagger turnaround windows, the $80M resource-plan mismatch he caught, risk-based contingency per piece of equipment, and AI untangling 64,000 documents.
“A turnaround is a maintenance event at its core. But of course, we are creatures of opportunity.”Grant Stead · Ep 001
The storyAustralia’s largest water utility, serving more than five million people with assets that will run for fifty years under regulated prices. Omer Iqbal answers from inside the approval room: what boards actually need before committing hundreds of millions, why a project delivered on time and on budget can still fail as an investment, and how portfolio reporting fragmented across five systems (SAP, P6, ARM, Unifier, Power BI) became one portfolio intelligence view for capital prioritisation.
“A project can be delivered on time and on budget, and still fail as an investment.”Omer Iqbal · Ep 021
The storyA five-mile Corps of Engineers levee rebuild after Katrina, driven entirely by pile production: six rigs, three per heading, on an innovative batter-frame rig setup that ran both rigs from the same side of the levee. The crews carried a good-day number of 21 to 22 piles per rig in their heads; the rolling average said 14, which meant two months late and $10M in liquidated damages. Shown that math, they hired a subcontractor with weeks to spare, one of Travis Arlitt’s earliest execution-realism receipts, and the job that soured him on measuring progress with cost.
“You’ve been driving 14 piles on average per day per rig. You thought it’s 20, but look at your rolling average and you can’t dispute. You need to do 20 per rig per day to make your plan. So tell me how we’re gonna catch that up.”Travis Arlitt · Ep 013
Full-speed execution without stage gates: Tesla's first lithium refinery and the team that had to be blended to build it.
Gigafactory & Manufacturing
Gigafactory & Manufacturing
Tesla Lithium Refinery
Corpus Christi, Texas, USA
North AmericaLithiumTeam integration
The storyTesla’s first lithium refinery, where James Wiseman led the integration of teams in 2023 and 2024. He uses it as the case study for breaking down oil and gas stage gates: once Tesla decided to build, there was no tuning the design for one more percent of return, the question became what can we buy and do right now to keep moving. The team blended battery-factory veterans from Sparks, Exxon chemical plant operators, and upstream people, and its cleaner pressure-leaching route to lithium hydroxide gets its own segment.
“We’re not making high-pressure flammable fluids, we’re making lithium hydroxide. Nothing was gonna blow up. That was something I learned by talking to everybody.”James Wiseman · Ep 003
North AmericaRail electrificationAlliance contract
$15Bas cited on the show
The storyThe On-Corridor Works program expanding and electrifying Toronto’s GO rail network. Ellie Moradinezhad’s joint venture team spent two and a half years on the proposal with contributors from Australia, the Middle East, South Africa, the Americas, Ontario and Quebec, and won the $15B job. She uses it to show how alliance-style collaborative contracts and disciplined, leadership-led software selection make integration real, and is candid about what the COVID-era proposal marathon cost the team personally.
“We worked on the OnCorr proposal for two and a half years. We won the job and it was a $15 billion job.”Ellie Moradinezhad · Ep 014
2,700 projects · $100M to $500M eachas cited on the show
The storyThe recurring mega-program of the season. Geoff Ryan calls the US buildout a gold rush of 2,700 mega projects before 2030 and explains how it inverts delivery into his PEPSI model: buy what the market actually has, then design around it, with everything modularized because the technology turns over every six to twelve months. The theme returns through James Wiseman on power demand, Ahmed AbdelSalam on staffing multi-billion tech campus programs, and Christina Robinson on data centers raiding the project controls talent pool.
“Basically 2,700 mega projects before 2030… do the math on that. It’s basically a gold rush.”Geoff Ryan · Ep 006
How this map is drawn
A project earns a card when the show gives it real airtime: a story, a segment, or a recurring thread, never a passing name-drop. That bar keeps Trans-Alaska, LNG Canada and a few other one-liners off the list until they get a proper telling. Dollar figures are as cited on air and directional, not audited. Quotes are lightly condensed from the recordings. Photos are hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under the license shown on each card; projects without a verified photo get a sketch instead. Spot a project we missed in an episode? Tell Orion.
