I was at CBU and I can honestly say we had all failures. Over and over. In the biger Chevron CBU's failures were small compared Angola, Wheatstone, AMBU, Bigfoot.....all horrible failures. Is there at least one big win Watson can honestly point at? Or all smoke and mirrors? Have we succeeded in any projects?
33 replies (most recent on top)
4jco, I think Texaco may have gone under, not for Petronius, but over the Ecuadorian pollution lawsuit. Chevron handled it very well. Maybe Texaco wouldn't have been so fortunate.
Interesting summary, 4pjd. I do believe you have made a good point.
The only reason Petronius is and was successful was the Chevron take over of Texaco. If not for that stroke of genius, the Star would have bit the dust a long time ago!!
The elevator revamp in HOU15 and HOU14, may one day be successful! That's something. Chevron is a case study in PC management. The corporation is a cluster of silos. The spin the put out is that Chevron is a flat, matrix organization. That is corporate speak for absolutely no accountability. The top tier managers of the hundreds of business units (BU)s, rotate every 2.5 years. The middle managers stay and build up their small kingdoms of loyal friends and family.
When a new executive rotates in, they are often undermined by the entrenched mini-mangers and their lieutenants.
Now the little empires are crumbling and cut to the corrupt core. They are fighting consolidation and streamlining. They get away with it, because so many of the mangers have no business management training. They are former "engineers," a catchall title that includes commercial fisherman, office maintenance managers, roustabouts, trucking logistics managers and even a few real drilling foremen.
Back office functions should have been centralized 20 years ago. IT web-based applications have streamlined HR, Accounting, Payroll, Real Estate, Office Services, PR, Career Development and IT Services at virtually all large corporations, but no, not at Chevron. They have redundant positions in every business unit. BCG outlined the waste. But there was too much push-back from the intrenched, mini-fifedoms.
Kuito rotted and is now gone. Not sure if it was profitable, but CABGOC has only made money a couple years out of the last 10. At least that's the grumblings around the water cooler.
I thought they missed the target a couple times on agambi.....recall reading s bunch of rm lookbacks on bad seismic interpretations
Yeah but it's over 15 years ago. Recent results not so good. Root cause is poor performance by our FE's and Drilling people. Ops and PE are stronger performers.
Folks, despite the dropping of one of the Petronius modules, this project has significantly overproduced the reserves originally identified. Thus a very successful project.
Kuito
Hey @3bva, stop talking out of your ass The Petronius smaller south module accident happened in December 1998. Chevron didn't acquire Texaco until 2000. Get your facts straight, clown.
Listen Whippersnapper! If Texaco dropped it, Chevron dropped it. Texaco lives in Chevron.
Yes, The DB-50 dropped it (half of it - one module) when a faulty cable snapped. That had little to do with either owners Texaco nor Marathon, must less Chevron, who was not even in the picture at the time.
Petronius??? Didn't they drop it overboard the first try????
-3hwc. An old farmer's saying: "Until the grain is in the silo, the wheat and the chaff are together."
In summary, some low/no quality assets come along with the real money makers.
Probabably some parallels to be made with CVX employee ranks. LOL
I believe Tahiti was a good one as well as Petronius.
Good one, 3njk. If Agbami was a Chevron MCP rather than an acquisition, I'm sure you would have flushed the toilet just to watch your turd go around and around, delaying forever to go down.
I once used the toilet at Agbami. Smooth flush and no backups. Job well done, Texaco.
I agree that Agbami is one of the better successes as a stand alone MCP.
Sorry if the following statement draws the ire of -2uaf and other former Texaco employees, but Agbami was also an acquisition. In advance, kudos for a great discovery and development strategy in a very complicated country.
However, combined with everything else that CVX inherited (including the potential Ecuador environment financial liability), was the Texaco acquisition the best "MCP" for CVX to have invested in?
I know it's outside the 10 year window, so I expect a troll to join the posts. I would enjoy valid opinions from former Ts and anyone who actually worked on this asset.
AGBAMI - NIGERIA CVX CASH COW
Agbami.
How is AMBU a failure? Every BU is hit with lower commodity (oil and nat gas) which has caused projects to seem less desirable.
It all depends on what criteria is used to define a "win"!
Sad, but an old motto from CNL (Nigeria): "If you can get anything accomplished, within any budget, in any amount of time and without getting anybody kidnapped or killed... your project is a success."
I fully agree with comment about doing proper Lookbacks. Unfortunately, where CVX misses the mark is they get so blinded by a singular path forward that they neglect to forecast and make contingencies for things that aren't part of the original plan. 2 good examples: 1) unions (Australia), 2) EPC strategy (pretty much every one of the Big MCPs out there today...including the $37.9B USD one that just got FID today).
Mafumeira Northe
Chevron often doesn't do proper lookbacks on MCPs. If they really wanted to improve, they would do thorough lookbacks and drive learnings into future projects. Instead they declare victory and move on.
Don't call my baby ugly! JSM is my "shining star", sing him a lullaby.
SGI/SGP
Lo perm reservoir. Let's see how production holds up. ExxonMobil is cancelling wells that tie into JSM. I guess they didn't get the memo
JSM is not a success in the real world. It may payout one day, but it is an investment that the no one with any business sense would repeat had they known the final outcome. It is sad to see that folks believe this is the shining star example of a win. I guess in the Chevron sense, it is the best they can do (least F'd up, least loss of money), but it is an economic turd in every sense of the word. The facility will never come close to design capacity or ever dream of installing additional capacity as was planned in the empty space on the west side of the facility. The wells are too tight, and any future enhanced recovery project work ( which the investment was founded on) is too expensive. No, JW doesn't have jack $hit to hang his hat on except for that eagle at Pebble Beach.
Tahiti
JSM was a huge success and it producing a lot of oil with very high reliability numbers
Nope. Chevron is top notch according to certain people on here, yet the evidence, fatality rate and examples like Gorgon, Bigfoot, AMBU etc speak for themselves.
Eagle at Pebble Beach.
Jack St Malo