Capital project advisory · Houston, Texas
Independent due diligence, lender's engineering, execution readiness, controls and delivery leadership for major energy and industrial capital projects — at any phase, from concept selection through construction and into operations. Twenty-five years and more than $20 billion of it run from inside the client's organization, accountable for the outcome — not reviewed from a distance.
Where we work in the project lifecycle
Concept → Operations
The problem
Some of them are construction failures — productivity that never recovers, execution management that does not move as the job moves, a plan defended long after it stopped matching the work. Most are decided years earlier: a concept locked in before the trade-offs were understood, a schedule built to a funding announcement rather than to the work, a contracting strategy that moved risk onto a party who could not carry it.
And the failure modes that get the least attention are not technical at all. A project management system that was never built for this project. Organizational and leadership weaknesses that stay hidden at ordinary scale and become structural above a billion dollars. The way a project starts is the way it finishes.
By the time it shows up in the numbers, the options are gone.
The earlier you look, the more you can still change — an honest read on whether a project is actually ready to pass the gate in front of it, and the discipline to say so before the money is committed.
When a project is already past that point, the work is different but not smaller: establish where it truly stands, reset the plan and the estimate to something the team can actually deliver, and then hold the line. Far fewer advisers have done that than have written the report recommending it.
What sets this apart
Most capital project advisers have reviewed megaprojects, audited them, or run a function on one. Very few have been the single named person accountable for delivering one.
On Energía Costa Azul and Hong Kong I also set up the client-led safety program before FID and then implemented it through execution. Across those two projects: 24 million work hours without a single lost-time injury. Designing the system and then being accountable for delivering against it are the same argument — the safety record is what that argument looks like in practice.
Answerable to the joint venture for every part of delivery — the estimate, the schedule, the contractor, the regulator, and the safety of everyone on site. That is a different qualification from assessing a project from the outside. It changes what you notice in a schedule, which risks you take seriously, and whether you are willing to tell a board something it does not want to hear.
How to read this site
It matters which one you are looking at, so the site does not blur them.
Eight major projects I ran from inside the client's organization as project director, project manager or engineering manager — accountable for delivery, not advising from outside. More than $20 billion delivered, fifteen first-of-a-kinds, and 24 million work hours without a lost-time injury on the two projects where I set up the safety program before FID and then ran it.
See the delivery recordGlen Cunial, capital project advisory — due diligence, lender's engineering, controls, delivery leadership and training. The practice is new; the judgment behind it is not. Engagements will be published as case studies once they complete and clients agree to be named.
Case studiesExplore
Owners, lenders and acquirers ask different questions about the same project.
02Six families of work, from due diligence to training, tied to the decision in front of you.
03Fifteen first-of-a-kinds, every project and every phase, with the technology and contracting detail.
04Who you actually get, and how engagements are run.
05Tell me what decision is coming.