003 – Energy and People: Building the Teams Behind Tomorrow’s Power Projects with James Wiseman

[00:00:00] Host: Welcome to the Major Project podcast, your inside. Look at the high stakes world of billion dollar projects.

[00:00:11] Orion Matthews: Welcome to the major project podcast, hosted by me or I’m Matthews. We’re diving into the world of high stakes projects, each with budgets of over a billion dollars. Through conversations with industry experts such as James Weissman, who we have here today. We are uncovering key lessons, strategies, and insights to help elevate the practice of managing and delivering on these monumental projects.

James, welcome to the podcast. Hey, thanks Orion. I’m glad

[00:00:37] James Wiseman: to be here. Excited.

[00:00:39] Orion Matthews: Yeah. And so James, you’re, you’ve been a capital projects manager. You’ve got 25 years of experience in upstream energy business. I know you’ve led multiple teams through all the stages of major projects, I believe from appraisal to startup.

And you have a deep understanding of both Greenfield, brownfield projects. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your history. [00:01:00] I know you’ve worked at Chevron we worked together at Santos and Tesla and things like that. So maybe just take us a little bit through some of your career.

[00:01:10] James Wiseman: Sure thing, Ryan. Thanks. I I like to say I work on energy projects. I’ve worked on energy projects my whole career. It’s the kind of thing that gets me outta bed in the morning, especially the opportunity to do big things, which is really cool. But believe it or not, I I started doing decommissioning projects for three years.

[00:01:29] Orion Matthews: Oh, wow. And

[00:01:30] James Wiseman: so I got a little bit of the end of life kind of stuff early in my career. But then after that I pivoted into deep water projects. Mostly like subsea deep water, the capital project side there. And then I also did a stint in a new ventures and exploration group.

Okay. At Noble Energy. After I finished a few projects, I got an opportunity to do that. So I got to see like the drivers of what makes a good [00:02:00] energy lease.

[00:02:01] Orion Matthews (2): And

[00:02:01] James Wiseman: like how to get into them. That was pretty cool. And like figuring out different ways to do projects to make ’em economic. And then, yeah, I’ve done the arctic stuff up here with oil search and Santos dipped my foot into renewables a little bit.

I did big project for Tesla. The like integration of all the teams for their lithium refinery down in Texas was down there in 2023 and 2024. And then did a little bit of renewable energy consulting and now I’m back in Alaska working for the Ali Esca Pipeline company.

[00:02:33] Orion Matthews: Awesome.

[00:02:33] James Wiseman: I’ve been all over the place.

Lucky to be able to work in some crazy places like, west Africa, Russia, Alaska, obviously, Texas is a little bit crazy offshore, so it’s been a lot of fun and doing these big projects is really exciting.

[00:02:50] Orion Matthews: I’m really excited to get into them with you and I think this kind of brings us to our topic, which you couldn’t be more perfect to to talk about, which is energy and people like how do [00:03:00] we, grow and use the people and skills we have and keep the big projects under control, to deliver on this almost exponential energy demand that’s, that is here and is coming.

Very excited to talk about that. And I think when we were listing out a couple questions, one of the ones that was really fascinating to me personally was to talk about scale. Because, energy scaling up and projects that are as big as the ones you’ve worked on in the billion dollar space, and there’s so few people that have actually done this.

It’s so unique to have you on and be able to talk about it, but how do you scale fast and how do you do that? How do you do it right In industrial engineering and construction and all of these major projects, would you say?

[00:03:45] James Wiseman: That the oil and gas like project execution approach is very well structured.

Over the last like 20, 25 years, there’s this like stage gate approach that’s been developed. You just follow these steps and your project is gonna go [00:04:00] great, right? And it’s just not the case, because pro projects are planned and built by people, there have been a lot of learnings along the way.

The getting a project over the line is really hard. Some of the people that, that we know, they call it like riding the bull and you’re trying to stay on the bull and keep the thing project on track for eight, just eight seconds, right? Is riding a bull.

Yeah. And like people fall off all the time and people always ask like, why did you fall off the bull? Eight seconds. It’s not that long. Can’t you get this done? And it’s just tremendously hard, it’s like balancing on top of a ball and to get a project done, you have to have the right plan.

You have to have the right and you have to have the right people, and if you don’t have that mixture, it’s really difficult. And obviously both of those things combine to make the project culture for a good project. So that’s the,

[00:04:52] Orion Matthews: the macro view. And then once you get those things set up, how do you go [00:05:00] fast?

Because as we’re seeing, I think the stat is that 5,000 data centers are gonna be built over the next five years. Maybe that’s a little high, but somewhere in that neighborhood. And so we’re entering into this period where it seems like more and more major projects are gonna get executed in a rapid period of time.

And they need to be built quickly. And what advice would you give somebody that is. Sitting in a boardroom or maybe in a leadership circle and thinking about building a $5 million major construction project. And they wanna do it as quick as possible.

[00:05:35] James Wiseman: The joke I think we talked about once is there’s no like big red easy button that you can push that says do project, execute project.

Yeah. And so the mega projects take a long time to get all the permits, get all the financing and money together, and then like sanction the project. And so a lot of people think once you get the money, you just push the button and you just go. Yeah. But it’s [00:06:00] very difficult. Like you said, scaling is really tough.

The energy business needs to have some kind of breakthrough in order to do all the projects that we wanna do right now. It’s a very strange time where you have like the traditional oil companies shedding people right now. Yeah. And then you’ve got the other companies that are just desperate for people.

And if you look at the number of l and g liquification plants that are sanctioned right now or in feed and how many are gonna be built in the next five years. There just aren’t enough people. It’s a And that’s not counting the data center stuff that you mentioned Orion. So it’s just a very interesting time.

The traditional ways of working, like we talked about with the stage gate they’re very clunky for what the kind of like the new energy business wants to do. If you look at, like traditionally you, you plan you come up with a scope, you like engineer that whole thing into a big package.

Yeah. And you buy some materials, then you hire contractors and then you go do the project, right? So that [00:07:00] is not the way people wanna operate now, certainly not Tesla. It’s like the, the execution approach is more like, what can we buy now and what can we do now so that we can keep things moving fast?

[00:07:14] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah.

[00:07:14] James Wiseman: Like Tesla for example, on the lithium refinery, once they knew they were gonna do the project, it was like not a question of oh, there’s 16 different ways to do this. If we just improve this one a little bit, we’ll get one more percent rate of return. So let’s work on it a little more.

It was like, no, we are going full speed ahead. So those old like kind of stage gates need to just be broken down. And so like the new way of executing now is what can we do and what can we buy to accelerate the project? So a lot of

[00:07:44] Orion Matthews: pre-feed kind of activity, but also just blurring of the lines between where you’re at when you think about a stage gate in a sense,

[00:07:53] James Wiseman: yes.

Definitely blurring the gates. I just think of it as a stream of activities. Now, as long as you have a [00:08:00] good project, you just go as fast as you can. And so it’s not necessarily, the engineering phase is not necessarily to deliver the best, 100% design detailed package. It’s like needs to be sequenced to order materials and keep the materials flowing into the project.

[00:08:20] Orion Matthews: So this is a little bit in my world of software development, right? We had this transformation where we, everything was Waterfall, which is essentially somewhat of a stage gate approach to building software solutions. And then Amazon and some of the other really big players came along and they had this same problem of we have to execute, we have to build amazon.com and it’s a multi-billion dollar investment, but we’re moving really fast.

We just have to get it done. And they invented Scrum or Agile methodologies to which essentially just says, we’ll just keep paying money and keep this team together and manage all these sort of dots on the board as best we can and just go forward. And that [00:09:00] methodology I was really skeptical of at the time.

I ca, I’m a little bit older in the software business and I was like, I don’t think that works very well, but it’s worked great for them. It takes a leap of faith, I think. In terms of cost control, because when you don’t have everything defined and you’re just like, we’re going, we’re gonna order this stuff, let’s just do it.

It’s hard to give a final number. It’s maybe more of a range. Like how do you think the energy business might, would, do you think they’ll accept a model like that? Like how would you explain it to people?

[00:09:31] James Wiseman: That is a good question because I think the bigger and slower, like traditional oil companies are struggling with what, how to do this right now.

If you look at like the oil companies. Themselves. They decided maybe five years ago, like maybe a little bit earlier than that we wanna do renewables. Like BP is gonna be doing a lot of renewables. They all opened a new business and they said they were gonna do this, but they tried to do renewable energy projects like [00:10:00] oil and gas projects.

And who’s gonna hire a oil company and give them money to do a project that old fashioned way? It’s just not gelling. I don’t know if you’ve seen, but it’s just not working for ’em. As an investor, who would I wanna give my money to build a data center? I wouldn’t wanna hire a midstream energy company that runs pipelines.

I wouldn’t wanna hire an oil company. Maybe I dunno who I’d wanna hire. Yeah. Right now there’s a lot of financial hucksters out there that are basically like, just gimme money and I’ll get some gas turbines and I’ll build you. Power plant, so it’s a really interesting time and I don’t think there’s any best practice yet.

Yeah. I think like Tesla is very good at being first and the prize in the things they’re chasing and some of the data center people are chasing. The prize is so big to be the first mover that like, it really isn’t as important to have a perfectly controlled, cost controlled project as it is to be first.

Yeah. And l and g might be [00:11:00] like that too. If you get to ship the first cargo out the west coast, like the Canadians got to do that recently l and G Canada or the people in Mexico, there may be some huge value there that it’s not like captured in your like metrics.

Or very difficult to capture. So like how do you scale? You just need to have good plans and good people is your, is my fir first principles for that.

[00:11:24] Orion Matthews: Yeah. Internal,

[00:11:25] James Wiseman: loose.

[00:11:26] Orion Matthews: And I think you’re tapping on the door of something that really, it’s almost a crisis, if you could say it that way.

It sounds alarmist, but it’s like there’s a transformation that needs to happen in the space around thinking about how projects should be executed almost at a fundamental level like scrum to versus waterfall. And breaking down those barriers is gonna be a must to meet the energy demand, which maybe we can tiptoe into because I’m really excited to talk about some of the sort of things that are happening around there.

Particularly renewable [00:12:00] energy. I know that you have some experience and understand the dynamics of what’s going on with lithium right now. I know Chevron, I think announced that they’re going into lithium, so I’m curious what you’re seeing on the world stage, in the energy space, and particularly in the renewable energy space.

[00:12:17] James Wiseman: You bet, Ryan. Yeah. I’m super passionate about this and it’s not because I’m like an evangelist of renewable energy, it’s that we need so much more electricity right now, and we’re like a cave diver and we’ve gone all the way into the cave and like we might not have enough air to make it back out again.

[00:12:34] Orion Matthews: Oh

[00:12:34] James Wiseman: like I’m a electric rate payer and I know you are, we’re both, we’re all using electricity right now to do this podcast, and like people need more electricity and if as rate payers, if our electric bills start going up ’cause of these data centers, et cetera, et cetera, people are gonna be pissed.

Yeah. So we have to find a way to get the energy that we need to do this. And it’s gonna be tough, if you just look at renewable energy, it’s it’s [00:13:00] intermittent, you’ve got many different ways to make it. I think like the ones that I’m interested in talking about is obviously like solar and battery storage.

Like we’ll hit that one first. Geothermal, enhanced geothermal. It’s super hot right now. That was a good pun. We’ll we’ll talk about that a little bit and then just keep going with natural gas. ’cause we have a lot of it, and it’s actually, I don’t know if you saw the news last week, the UN still considers it like a low carbon or I don’t know if they called it a renewable, but they call it a green fuel.

Yeah. Anytime natural gas displaces coal for making electricity, it’s a good thing. Lemme just work my way through those,

and you’re right that those, the majors are. Starting to explore and get into producing lithium, they’re making joint ventures. Exxon I think was one of the first to do a big one here in the states in Texas and Arkansas.

And then I think Ecuador went in next when they both went with local partners and then Chevron just announced they’re going in last week. [00:14:00] And oddly enough, some of our friends from Noble Energy are like heading that up. Kristen Kasey I used to work with at Noble is heading that up at Chevron.

So it’s a very small world in the energy business and very cool. But if you just focus, on solar. It’s like really simple. Probably some of the people of listening to this have solar panels on their house. It’s cool, right? Like when the sun’s out and it’s really hot and you need to run your air conditioner, it’s great if you can run it off the solar, right?

So that’s cool. Or if you can charge your car if it’s in the right place. But if you look at like the output, you really only get about eight hours a day of like really nice energy production. And electricity has to be 24 hours, seven days a week. So two thirds of the time you’ve gotta do something else.

So like with solar, you have to produce. Three times the energy you need in an eight hour period so that you can go for 24 hours and that’ll just get you to the next day, yeah. So the storage component is a really big deal right now, and that’s where, [00:15:00] energy storage, there’s a lot of different ways to store electricity.

None of ’em are like super awesome yet, you can convert it to hydrogen and then you can have a fuel cell, you can put it into some kind of chemical storage, which is batteries. And lithium iron phosphates really pretty good right now. And then you have to be able to, you have to like, produce enough electricity out of your batteries to get you to nighttime when things tend to settle down and there’s more electricity available.

So that’s what batteries are doing right now. But eventually we need to figure out the fact that like you have to produce three times what you need during the day. Yeah. And then you have to store it and have it ready when you need it. And then we have to figure out long duration energy storage.

Which we like barely scratched the surface on that one. How go ahead.

[00:15:46] Orion Matthews: So I’m just curious about that. Like, how do you think the industry is, do you see a connection between battery technology then and solar is basically the answer to that problem? Or is it more like battery, [00:16:00] solar’s great, but you’re gonna need a bridge with natural gas or some other it’s gonna be a mix of energy effectively to solve this problem, we

[00:16:08] James Wiseman: need, we need everything on the list, right?

Yeah. It’s totally true that we need all of the above. So like the battery storage and solar it’s getting to be like consumer level now where, people have batteries in their garage and they have solar panels on the roof and they’re getting comfortable with it. So that’s why I hit that one first, but there’s a lot of other things.

You’ve got. Intermittent stuff like wind and sun and then you’ve got base load, which you just have to have, you just have to have that steady, like producing electricity 24 7. And nuclear does that. Geothermal energy can do that. Natural gas combined cycle does that pretty well.

Like you need the mix. So that’s what I’m getting at. Like we definitely need everything all at the same time. ’cause if you look at electricity, demand curves and things we just need everything.

[00:16:58] Orion Matthews: Yeah. And so when [00:17:00] you talk about building like a solar project, like at scale, like a billion dollar renewable energy project, ’cause you’ve worked both in that space and then you’ve worked on traditional oil and gas.

Are there differences that, say you’re somebody that’s been in the, traditional oil and gas space and you’re about to take on a big multi-billion dollar solar farm projects. Do you have advice. For someone that might be going into that or some thoughts on how those projects should be executed or even planned or defined.

[00:17:31] James Wiseman: Sure thing. So they’re very different as you can imagine, right? If you just look at a solar farm and use that as an example, it’s like a oil and gas unconventional project in that you’ve gotta get good land with good sun and good place to build a solar farm. And then you have to do like very efficient design and installation of solar panels and electrical cabling and inverters.

So instead of drilling and completing, 16 wells [00:18:00] with hundreds of frack stages each, you’ve gotta get like really good at planning and installing, thousands of solar panels. So it actually has some parallels, but it’s a very like. Utility scale solar is like a very commoditized thing now.

People know like down to the penny how much everything’s gonna cost per kilowatt hour but that’s just for producing electricity for that eight hours. The storing it thing is just starting to ramp up as a big business now. So there are a lot of parallels between like unconventional oil development or gas development and like utility scale, solar pv.

But I would say the battery storage is like the wild west. People have been going out there. There’s like land men trying to buy land. Yeah. Near electrical substations pretty much all bought up now. And so they can put battery storage there so they can like either feed it to the grid or take it off the grid.

So there’s a very like, intense commercial component that, like the major project, people [00:19:00] don’t often see that, that part of it. You’re like, why are we building this here?

[00:19:04] Orion Matthews: If you have a project team that’s delivering on that, so you if I’m making the translation here from Old World to new, or I guess different world to different the, you have a Drilling and Wells team and they were always like the, could have been considered one of the stars of the show depending on what kind of project you’re involved in.

And they’re out there getting those wells done for a solar farm. Is it the electrician team at that point that they’re like the workhorse team that is putting together those wires and, or is it, is there not? Yeah, I’m just curious like how you divide up the Yeah. Boy, the groups there,

[00:19:37] James Wiseman: Like the.

Traditional stuff goes out the window. I think like the people that have the hardest time right now are the supply chain and procurement people like getting the materials for the inverters and cabling and the solar PV and all that. Probably incredibly hard right now. Really, just due to the changing in com en commodity environment and trade.

But like I would say maybe the other [00:20:00] thing is just like anything having to do with electrical grid connections, high voltage is extremely high demand and long lead time. Whether it’s getting like a inner tie or a grid tie done, that take could take five or six years to get all the way through where you can actually close the switch incredibly long.

And then finding like engineers that can do high voltage, electrical is pretty, pretty tight market right now.

[00:20:27] Orion Matthews: Okay. Question real quick, and I know we gotta jump, we gotta talk about geothermal soon. But I really wanna know, like why do I’ve heard this before, that procurement is the bottleneck.

Why we’re in a digital world now. We all have digital supply chains. How could procurement be, you would think that’s, the intersection of supply and demand, right? It’s like the ultimate expression of the capitalistic model. What do you think is the difficulty on procurement or. What do you [00:21:00] think is going on this?

For just

[00:21:00] James Wiseman: for solar, for example or let’s just say any electrical components right now. Orion. Yeah. Like Transformers. It’s just like demand is outstripping, supply on so many of those things.

[00:21:12] Orion Matthews (2): Huh.

[00:21:12] James Wiseman: And then if somebody puts a 25% tariff on you or you put it on them, but just imagine the project economic impact.

Yeah. If you’re ordering, 5,000 solar PV module panels, so it’s just tough to plan around that, that like the companies that aren’t getting tariffed, everybody wants to buy from ’em. So their lead time just went through the roof. Yeah, it’s it’s very unpredictable. And as like to plan and execute, you want predictability.

[00:21:40] Orion Matthews: And it’s also like some of the things I know with Nvidia, for example, in the and the factories that are producing chips, like they’re, they have huge demand, but in order to actually build a factory to do fabrication of chips at the level of precision that we need, which is probably similar to transformers, [00:22:00] it’s just not something you can throw up super quick.

And so yeah, that, that supply and demand, maybe it will level out, but it’s gonna be a while it seems like.

[00:22:09] James Wiseman: Yeah. It’s just the un, the market like certainty on things like that, and it’s just hard to plan with a lot of uncertainty right now,

[00:22:17] Orion Matthews: particularly on a makeup project because you’re. It seems like it’s almost always an international effort to do these projects.

Yeah.

[00:22:26] James Wiseman: Yep. And Tesla mega packs, they’re large battery storage modules. They’re the tractor trailer size. Yeah. 1.3 megawatt hours ish. Those things, like when the administration changed, those things went in high demand and if you didn’t have your order placed, it was pretty tough.

It was pretty tough there. So that’s one example.

[00:22:45] Orion Matthews: Yeah. The let’s shift over and talk a little bit about geothermal then. Just going back down that list. I think that one was next. I’m excited to crack into this a little bit, to, to use another pun. Another pun. Yeah.

[00:22:58] James Wiseman: I, I’m not a [00:23:00] geothermal expert by any means.

I’m just interested in it and I’ve researched it a lot because it has all of the makings for a really good energy system for us. And it uses a lot of the skills that we’ve developed in this country over the last 50 years in, in the oil business, and especially in the last 15 in the unconventional oil business.

So it’s and it’s base load energy, right? You’ve got hot rocks, you’re converting that through all kinds of different systems to make electricity, right? That’s the core of it. Dang, I just made another pun. So the the thing that’s cool about this is, and it’s just really started to pick up the last couple years, is enhanced geothermal energy.

You’re not pulling like hot water out of the ground that’s already there. There’s a big project out in California in Calistoga. It was producing all through until about 2000. There’s already water and there’s vulcanism, there’s hot steam and like the people at Unical was one of the companies drilled down, produced that steam made electricity.

So enhanced [00:24:00] geothermal is not that. It’s like finding the right rocks that are hot and can conduct the heat and then drilling instead of drilling unconventional oil, you still drill two wells and you fracture, but you use it so that you can like inject water down one, pump it through the rock, through the fractures that you’ve made, turn it into steam high energy and bring it up the other well.

So that’s enhanced geothermal in a nutshell. And if you wanna learn more about it, VO energy in Houston, like they’ve attracted a bunch of interest, a bunch of capital, they’re doing some really cool projects. You can read more about it on their site and that’s enhanced geothermal.

But what’s so cool about it? Yeah, it runs 24 7. It’s always producing electricity and it uses like these drilling and completion techniques that we’ve learned in the oil business. If you think like what is the coolest renewable energy mix right now? It’s one that’s like close to oil [00:25:00] and gas, but produces energy without producing CO2.

Yeah. It’s it’s got all the ingredients. So I think it’s really gonna take off and, if you look at the different parts of the country, the places where people need electricity, you, I’m sure you’ve heard of like the Pacific Rim and Ring of Fire.

[00:25:17] Orion Matthews (2): There a

[00:25:17] James Wiseman: lot of people in that area that live in the Pacific Rim and there’s a lot of geothermal heat there. So nice if you look at it that way. But other places have it too. It’s just even in the Permian, believe it or not, I think is pretty darn hot. Yeah. When you get down.

[00:25:32] Orion Matthews: So how hot do you have to get really? Is it enough to make steam or do you just you have to

[00:25:38] James Wiseman: get much hotter than boiling water. Okay. You have to get much, much hotter, like a good number for like steam in a steam power plants, like around 700 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay. And if you look at drilling and completion equipment and tools from the oil field, and it’s just not, it’s just not there for that kind of temperature use yet.

[00:25:55] Orion Matthews: Yeah.

[00:25:56] James Wiseman: And the kind of rock that you have to drill through is much different.

[00:25:59] Orion Matthews: [00:26:00] So are there like reservoir engineering kind of specialists that can find these hotspots too?

Or is it a new field of study and people are going out there and taking a look at all these old pieces of land? Or like, how do you find these spots?

[00:26:14] James Wiseman: I think it’s a little bit of both, right? Yeah. It’s like you need to find the hot rocks that you can fracture. And so instead of looking for looking for oil, but and like running some economic models on how much you’ll be able to produce and what costs.

This is more about like how much heat and heat flow and how much the equipment and drilling will cost to do it. So I think it, it really ports over a lot of the, a lot of the people from the oil field.

[00:26:40] Orion Matthews: Yeah. And I guess that ties into something that we started the conversation with, which we eventually we’ll have to tip into, which is talking about that the oil business is shedding jobs or has been, maybe that’s reversing and these are really great things to talk about these areas that people can go maybe you’re a drilling engineer and you’re out of a [00:27:00] job.

I didn’t know anything about what you were talking about with fracking. So that’s a pretty great option that something is going in for creating geo, geothermal energy. That could be a really interesting career path that aligns with those kinds of skills. Oh yeah,

[00:27:12] James Wiseman: definitely. Yeah.

[00:27:14] Orion Matthews: And I guess what, how do you think, what would be your advice if someone wants to get into the energy space and maybe make some of those bridges?

[00:27:22] James Wiseman: The energy business is a great business to get into. Even the oil and gas business is still incredibly challenging and fun, but now there are a lot of other segments of the energy sector that you can get into also. So it’s good. It is a really good place. And I think like my like 10,000 foot level is if you don’t know what you wanna do when you grow up, but you like science and math, if you wanna become, go to college, become an electrical engineer.

And if you don’t wanna go to college, become an electrician we need those people so badly in this country. The world needs them. Yeah. And if you look at just the demand for electricity and [00:28:00] everything that we wanna do, you can understand why, so I, that, that’s my kind of my first advice.

If you’re like. Looking to get into the energy business. There’s so many different opportunities, like how do you decide what part of it you wanna go into and, you need to go to meet some people and go to career fairs. You need to go to the SHO Offshore Technology Conference.

You need to go to like renewable energy conference. Like here in Alaska. We even have a local energy conference focused on renewables. And it’s every year in April or May. And that is a fantastic conference. I’ve been to that one. Just the best way to decide what do you wanna do when you grow up in the energy business is just to talk to people that are doing it, and there’s so many areas. Now there’s the emerging stuff in renewable energy. And there’s probably some things that haven’t been invented yet too.

[00:28:49] Orion Matthews: Yeah, AI is somehow gonna work its way into to this. Which might be another interesting topic to see if you feel like the, I know that AI is [00:29:00] impacting energy demand substantially.

I think, what do they say? Bots for wa watts for bots. Is that right? I haven’t

[00:29:08] James Wiseman: heard that one

[00:29:09] Orion Matthews: before,

[00:29:09] James Wiseman: Ryan.

[00:29:10] Orion Matthews: Yeah, people are, they I think the, originally it was Watts for per person is the way that you look at energy and now they’re saying it’s watts for bots which is, that’s a nuts for driving demand as well.

[00:29:20] James Wiseman: Yeah. Yeah. That is nuts. Yeah, it is a lot of electricity And yeah, like we talked about earlier, people are gonna be really pissed off if their electric bills start going up so that they can ask, how to make scrambled eggs or something like that and AI will help ’em.

[00:29:34] Orion Matthews: Yeah. I dunno what we’re gonna do.

What speaking of that, ’cause you’re you’re at the high level. Major project craft. Have you seen any impacts, obviously AI’s impacting demand, have you seen any AI impacts start to wiggle their way into the major project space? Yet maybe in terms of how [00:30:00] people are executing or using it as a tool or using it to learn there, there’s a lot of conversations going on about it, but I’m curious if you have any thoughts about how that might, how it might impact the space or is already

[00:30:15] James Wiseman: I think it’s certainly helping with analyzing performance.

On a major project. There’s like you talked about earlier, there’s thousands of people building some of these billion dollar projects and they’re all over the world. They’re fabricating in Asia and transporting and building and installing here. And so it’s definitely people are working on, I think you guys might be working on some way to analyze project and performance and control with AI because, finding the needle in the haystack of what’s going wrong on a project is very difficult.

Find, finding the important data can be tough,

[00:30:50] Orion Matthews: yeah.

[00:30:51] James Wiseman: So especially when you can’t like, be everywhere at all the time talking to people and like getting the real gist of how things are going.

So I see a lot of room for it to [00:31:00] help us there, and I’m not really sure when I was at Tesla we were working on the piping for the lithium refinery and drew Bago asked us like, why isn’t there a software that can just automatically route and design all this pipe for us?

[00:31:13] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah. And,

[00:31:14] James Wiseman: and it was like it, and I was asking myself the same question, like, how can this be this hard that we can’t, we had, I don’t remember how many linear feet of pipe to route, but it was a lot.

And it was like, why are people like clicking, from pipe support to route pipe these days?

There’s probably something gonna happen there.

[00:31:31] Orion Matthews (2): You

[00:31:31] James Wiseman: know, for sure when it comes to automating some of the design, and that’s a little bit scary for some people and it’s also really cool. Yeah. So those are just a few I could think of off the top of my head.

[00:31:46] Orion Matthews: Yeah. And do you think, I know that you have a lot of experience as well in modular fabrication, is that right?

And I wonder if maybe Modular Fabrication and AI will both be impacting the space at the same time, because [00:32:00] that’s a model where AI is like, here’s how you route everything. And then Modular Fabrication also simplifies these major projects into sort of bite-sized chunks. Is that kind of the way that, that, that works kinda help you scale up and compartmentalize your problem and simplify it?

[00:32:18] James Wiseman: Yeah, you’ve hit on a couple important things there, Ryan. One is that improvement in construction efficiency over the last say just pick 50 years, it’s not improved a lot.

And so like turning construction into manufacturing is one, manufacturing has improved dramatically.

On how fast something can be built. So that’s what one of the things about Modularization that’s cool is like turning part of the project into manufacturing. And the other thing is you don’t necessarily have the people where you need to construct the project, right? Like offshore, we talked about modules, you, you lift a 10,000 ton module onto an offshore facility. Yeah. Floating platform. So like you [00:33:00] build it one place, you bring it there, you put it onto the platform, because you can’t get the people there. Yeah. So that, that’s another area area and reason that modularization is so cool. You can.

Can break. Or if you’re building it somewhere and bringing it somewhere where you can hook it up, you just have to find like the right mix of skills. You want I don’t know, just some like typical modules you might have, like a gas compression module, power, electrical power generation module, living quarters module.

You wanna get like the right skills to build a living quarters module where people live and eat and sleep. Yeah. So that’s very different than the people that build like the power generation module.

You wanna find the skills there. And, I haven’t really thought too much about how AI would help with that, but you know what it can help us with is like, how can we change construction more into manufacturing?

[00:33:52] Orion Matthews: Yeah, that’s a really interesting insight that I hadn’t thought about that particularly the fact that we haven’t really made a lot of progress and other [00:34:00] industries are. Sort of making these exponential leaps. So kinda time to take a few new approaches, I think with modular construction as well. How would you advise someone that’s listening to this podcast, let’s just pretend they are working on thinking about executing a major project.

Maybe they’re in the planning stages and they’re like, wow, modular’s a pretty good idea, but I haven’t really thought about doing that before. Is it too late? When’s the right time, would you say to take the, is it like, it’s a, it’s an execution strategy, right? Like you have to, can you shift to it or do you wanna do it at a certain point in your project?

I guess.

[00:34:43] James Wiseman: And it’s definitely remember how I said you have to have the right plan and you have to have the right people.

[00:34:47] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah. So

[00:34:47] James Wiseman: This is definitely the planning phase when you decide this. And there’s the term stick built, that’s where you build everything on site.

[00:34:54] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah. You just

[00:34:55] James Wiseman: bring it there and build it. And then modularization is the other end of the extreme. Like in the [00:35:00] perfect modular project, you just bring it there and set it down, hook up your power and your outputs and things, and you go and you start it up, so it’s definitely in the planning phase, you need to decide, and it’s gonna based, be based on where you’re working, where the talent is.

And how, like how remote you are and if the capacity’s there, modularization isn’t gonna help you if every yard that builds modules is chockablock full building LNG plants.

[00:35:27] Orion Matthews: That’s true. So it goes back to procurement in some way as well. You have to make sure you can find someone that can do it for

[00:35:34] James Wiseman: you.

Yeah. And the, it’s not like a solution for everything too. Orion, as you can imagine, the difficulty with modular fabrication is getting the module finished and like pre-com commissioned and maybe partly commissioned before it comes to your project site. And a lot of times it’s like you have to ship a module before it’s done.

Okay. You got seasonal constraints, you’ve got a permit requirement. Governmental rules you if you have to start, sometimes [00:36:00] you have to ship the module and it’s not ready yet. Those are the challenges is getting ’em done before they ship out.

[00:36:06] Orion Matthews: And I is that, I guess what if I were to try and make a case then for doing this, let’s say it is the right setup, is there, like the Modular Construction Association of America that you, that will sell you a book on this?

Or like how do you. Build out that case to leadership that might have never done a modular project. And I think you may have actually helped encourage groups to do some modular work in the past that hadn’t done it before. I’m curious if Yeah. How you go about helping people understand the value and get a project to, to shift to a modular focus if it needs it.

[00:36:45] James Wiseman: If you look at just pick a name plate of something, let me use oil and gas. ’cause I’m used to that. You wanna produce 60,000 barrels per day of oil, right? And you’re gonna need say, 20 big modules to do it, or on an offshore facility, maybe three [00:37:00] super mega modules. So like you, you look at the cost, like you look at the cost and you look at how much faster you can do it.

And there’s usually an immediate value addition there, right? Where it might be a problem is if you need to use local labor, some places like, okay, great, you’re gonna build all of your modules overseas, bring ’em here, and there’s gonna be like five jobs to hook ’em up, right? Five full-time people.

That’s an extreme example, but you really want to, you really wanna look at that, like before you decide like maybe part of the project is modular and part of it isn’t, ’cause there’s some intrinsic value. Inherent value in, in having the local people. Yeah. Involved and invested in the success of the project too.

But usually the value is pretty obvious. There. There are some downsides, just if you think about having to lift up a giant heavy steel structure, you have to put a lot of structural steel into a [00:38:00] module that you wouldn’t need if you’re just building it in place, okay. So there’s extra steel weight in there, but.

People tend to think of structural steel as not that expensive, especially in a high tech fab. So it might, it’s probably okay.

[00:38:15] Orion Matthews: Thank you. Does that answer your question? It does. And I think this is a good time to segue ’cause we’ve talked a lot about energy and the topic was people and energy.

And one of the things that I remember about you, James, we were in a meeting, this, you’re the first person I’ve ever had on that actually was my you know I was able to work with and had your, I, so I got to be under your leadership a little bit. And it was really great and I appreciated it. And I remember we were in a meeting, I don’t really remember what was going on, but it’s something.

And you were able to come in and you set the tone. You deescalated a crisis. And said Hey, let’s like, wait a second, let’s just pause and make sure we don’t, this isn’t you paid [00:39:00] attention to the people and you thought a lot about, I think just the trade-offs and wanted to make sure everyone was okay and that we took the time to do it right.

I think it was a good call at the time, and I just remember thinking James is really savvy as a culture setter and as a leader. And now that I have you on the podcast, I ask you what kind of advice you would have for people or how to run teams. And I don’t work within your space anymore, so I’m not even plugging you as a as a boss.

But like the, I guess what kind of strategies and techniques have been helpful for you to develop your leadership style and what advice do you have for people that want to be successful in leading these mega scale projects?

[00:39:46] James Wiseman: Right on. Now. That’s a great question. Thank you. I I like to think that I’ve got some skill in this area, Orion, and I’m glad to hear from somebody else.

Engineers don’t always, aren’t always viewed as the [00:40:00] most empathetic people. And, it’s like dollars and cents, it’s like solutions in math. It’s but projects are built by people a hundred percent. They don’t build themselves, yeah. You really have to look at it as a team and I don’t believe in the, like traditional command and control leadership style is like going forward as a great way to work.

I don’t think people like working in a team like that. And nowadays people have lots of choices about where they wanna work, and so people wanna be a valuable member of a team. So like the project manager is almost like a coach at this point. Or project director. You, if you’ve got a really good team, you’re just helping them like drive toward the goal line.

And seeing how people work and finding out how they communicate, I always do that with people when I set up a team and meet with them for the first time. Hey, do, if something’s going wrong, do you want me to text you, call you, email you. Like, when’s a good time? If you’re not available, just tell me I’ll call you in 10 [00:41:00] minutes.

Just going through that with everybody and realizing that like it goes both ways is very important. You wanna communicate the way people like to communicate. Some people like a email where they can summarize everything, all their thoughts in one spot. Some people are just text me, Hey, call me.

[00:41:16] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah. You

[00:41:16] James Wiseman: know? So that’s a big part of it. Looking at yourself as a coach and letting, letting your people do their thing is really important. People hate to be micromanaged. The thing is in major projects though, like you do have to be controlling the project and moving it forward.

So it’s not to say that you can’t control, ’cause you absolutely have to, but it’s really about helping the teams see the milestones that are coming up and like getting everything lined up to hit those. So if you help people get those things lined out, you have a good plan and people have the tools to execute, then you can just let ’em rip.

And that is the best team to be on is where everybody’s and then people just look to you as the leader to help them if they get [00:42:00] stuck. That, that’s the way I look at it. Definitely a lot more asking these days than telling, in, in the major project world that’s like really important and just recognizing, yeah, people want to always be learning on the job.

Major projects take a long time. Just getting the project, like through the planning and funded and to execute takes a couple years and then executing a major project can take two to four, two to five years maybe. People need areas to grow on the team, move around and find new challenges.

There are just very few people that are coming into the workforce that wanna do the same thing for five years. Can you imagine?

[00:42:37] Orion Matthews: Yeah.

[00:42:37] James Wiseman: Having the, so as you go through the different phases of the project, people can move around to what they’re interested in or what they’re good at, and wanna do more of.

So I really encourage that. Those are just some of the things I do. Always remaining optimistic. I’m sure you’ve seen that about me as well.

[00:42:54] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah. People would never do

[00:42:55] James Wiseman: projects if they weren’t optimists because there’s so many things to overcome, to [00:43:00] get some, one of these mega projects delivered.

And I’m always optimistic about getting the project done ’cause I know, when people work together as a team, there’s really nothing they can’t do. And so just keeping that level of optimism super important.

[00:43:15] Orion Matthews: And it’s engineers, like you started with your comment, oftentimes have a hard time with that style.

I think. And again, from the development world that I’m in we run into that a lot where folks are people are a math equation and we’re gonna solve it and then we’re gonna factor that math equation and get rid of a few people and then it’s still gonna work. And like somehow something about that doesn’t quite work all the time.

Have you. Any advice to someone that might be listening to this and they’re like, yeah, that’s true. I’m an engineer. I just see it as moving people from A to B, but maybe I could should try to soften, maybe become a little more Wiseman in my approach. How would you advise them to learn [00:44:00] that style?

Would it be, is there some books in that you might have read or ways to adapt? Because I think there’s more people that are in the rigid, when you come through the science hard sciences, it’s often a, it’s a often a transition to to that sort of management style.

[00:44:23] James Wiseman: I would be hard pressed.

I, I think a lot of these things are very difficult to learn by reading a book, and they’re very easy to learn by doing. So my first thing that I would recommend is not, I’m not like slagging on any books. I’m just saying is to ask a lot of questions, right? As you’re going into this the best way to learn how to like get the, a successful project for everyone is just to ask a lot of questions.

Find, and that’s how you find out what’s important to everyone. That’s number one. And like number two is that a lot of times the best technical solution [00:45:00] is not the best overall solution, tell me more. You’ve got this whole new arena of like stakeholder management where if you successfully complete a project and mis meet all your targets, but like the stakeholders, the people that are gonna be interacting with or using your project or benefiting from it, if they’re not happy, then you may not be successful. Yeah. So like this whole thing of finding out some technical solutions and then just talking to the people that are gonna be involved.

Just to use like a tight example, it’s like the operations team, the commissioning team, the communications and local affairs people. Hey, here’s some different I options that we’re working through. What are the pros and cons, right? Just asking those questions will really take you far.

It’s tough to learn a lot of these things from a book. You really have to try ’em out on a smaller scale and just learn as you go. Yeah. There are a lot of a lot of good books about. Major projects and they talk through, like how big things [00:46:00] get done is a cool book.

Talks through a lot of project failures and why they failed and talks through some of the, like prototyping you can do and how to plan. But it’s like great. Like you really have to practice.

[00:46:13] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah.

[00:46:13] James Wiseman: You really have to just practice to do it.

[00:46:17] Orion Matthews: And I guess I want to touch on one thing that you triggered in that description, which is that projects, and we talked about this with modularization, but projects are executed by people and then people in the community that those projects exist, live with the results of that project.

They are integrated into it, into the fabric of their lives, possibly for a really long time. I’m just curious about as you were talking about like these projects have to work for you, it seems like the stakeholder management and the. Like being in, in connection with the communities that you’re gonna impact and hopefully have a good outcome for them is [00:47:00] like a new, not new, but it’s always been important.

Maybe it’s more important today than ever before as the world’s getting smaller and people are able to communicate across all different types of communities and so that the impact of these projects has to be woven into the community and thought through in a more.

Deliberate way maybe. Do you think that’s the case these days?

[00:47:25] James Wiseman: Yeah. If you look at a perfect outcome or what might be a perfect outcome, say for a electricity project, say on the West Coast somewhere. You want people at the end of the project when the thing is started up, you want everybody around there either that’s worked on the project, that’s benefiting from it, that lives nearby.

You want ’em to be proud of that thing that you did, right? Yeah. That is your hallmark of success, right? Is wow, I’ve got a steady job working at this facility now, seven, seven days a week, 12 hours a day I’m working there. Or yeah, we’re producing this thing and [00:48:00] exporting it and we’re like increasing the GDP of our country.

So there’s like getting that pride in project is very important and it’s another thing that helps with the stakeholders.

[00:48:10] Orion Matthews: Yeah. That’s really cool. So speaking of stakeholders and people and the energy business, would you say that as we talked about this, we said oil and gas is shedding geothermal, solar, wind, nuclear is on the rise.

Is that a fair thing to say at this point or perhaps like it’s balancing out. And I’m curious as you are managing these different people, do you have any advice for how to bring someone from one space to the next how to level them up and make them feel comfortable on a team?

Maybe if you’re joining a team of engineers that have been in the oil and gas space a really long time, how do you, how do they bring in someone from the solar side? Like how do we keep this [00:49:00] community together and grow together rather than being so siloed?

[00:49:05] James Wiseman: Just first though.

I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the oil and gas. I don’t know, they are shitting jobs right now. You can read about it in the newspaper, but it’s a very strange time. There’s plenty of oil and gas right now, but there’s not plenty of electricity and there’s not this like growth and exploration happening.

Yeah. Where we know where the oil is gonna come from in five years. We don’t know right now. It’s really weird. So I’m just not sure what’s gonna happen there. But as far as putting together a team with a mix of these folks. That is really interesting. Coming into, say Tesla, when we were building the lithium refinery, it was really fascinating.

We had people that had recently built like the battery module factory in Sparks, Nevada. We had people that had been working as operators in the chemical plant for Exxon in West Texas or East Texas. We had people like me from the upstream business and a lot of construction management.[00:50:00]

So it was an interesting mix, I see like the key to success there and coming in is just being willing to learn how the other people do things. I, I I had a very like fixed in my mind way of doing things at, and I started to listen to everyone at the Lithium Refinery project and I realized we’re not like making high pressure flammable.

Liquids, fluids out of this project were making lithium hydroxide. And so okay, so the stakes weren’t quite as high, we weren’t, nothing was gonna blow up. So that, that was something I learned by talking to everybody.

[00:50:37] Orion Matthews: Let’s yeah, let’s shift over and talk a little bit about the job market.

We were, we’ve been hinting that oil and gas space is shedding jobs, but it’s really not just the oil and gas space, it’s everywhere. There’s a lot of transition happening in the workplace. Some might be AI related, it might be tariff related economy shifting, things like that. I guess just maybe giving [00:51:00] some of the younger listeners that might be in college, some tips about this energy space, which we also said needs a lot of jobs.

So maybe there’s some advice that you could give our younger listeners that are looking to go into this field.

[00:51:18] James Wiseman: Right on. If you’ve seen some of the comics, there’s a lot of jokes. It’s oh the doctor’s got the baby and he is like explaining to the parents, I got some bad news like your son or your daughter’s an engineer, and that one always cracked me up, but no engineers are problem solvers.

And there, there are so many problems facing the, humans and the planet right now. And having enough energy is one of ’em, but there are so many other ones. Just like developing things to help people live longer and be healthy. Have clean water and clean air to breathe, get to the places they need to be, right?

So there’s just so many fun things to work on. If you don’t know what you wanna do, but you like solving technical problems there’s so [00:52:00] many opportunities out there. And the best thing to do is talk to people that are doing these, solving these problems, as a early career person, or if you’re in college, there are so many events that are like pre-made just for you to go and get a flavor of all of these different areas.

Oh, I think wastewater treatment is really interesting. Or I think building semiconductors is really interesting. Or I think drilling for geothermal energy or natural gas is interesting, so you’ve gotta really find what you’re interested in and when you’re younger, it could be a lot of things.

So try ’em all, try everything. Say yes to everything. If somebody calls and says, do you wanna get on a helicopter and fly offshore tomorrow? Can you be there at six in the morning? Say yes. So yeah. Talk to people, try things and there’s this huge demand, like you were saying earlier I don’t know if the marketplace and the business knows what it [00:53:00] needs right now.

To satisfy what the world needs. It’s like we need a lot of electricity, but at the same time, like electricians are like in high demand and nobody wants to become an electrician. Or like how many electrical engineers per year are graduating from universities in your country?

So it’s like what’s there’s not that meeting of like supply and demand for talent right now. It’s very confusing time. Finding out what you’re curious about and what you’re interested in is probably more valuable than saying go to this training class or go to this job board.

Start with what’s exciting for you? ’cause there’s so many problems to solve.

[00:53:40] Orion Matthews: What was exciting for you as a young man when you started getting into the energy space, would you say, was it a spark for you to to continue our puns? Oh, definitely. Yeah.

[00:53:55] James Wiseman: No, definitely. I grew up working on boats and fishing and doing ocean [00:54:00] things like diving, fishing boats.

So I knew I wanted to do something in the ocean, and I knew I wanted to be an engineer. So like I just had to find like a melding of all those things. And like literally when I looked at the college applications and I saw that there was offshore engineering, I just checked the box Orion. That’s how it got, I got into it, naval architecture and offshore engineering check.

And literally that’s how I got into Cal University of California, Berkeley. Like they were looking for people that were interested in that. And I was very fortunate and when I graduated. I tried working as a bridge engineer for a little while ’cause the bridge is over water.

That was cool. But then when I found out what people were doing offshore with some of these like mega floating facilities and the deep water projects that are in like 8,000 feet deep water, producing oil and gas there or maybe in 10 years wind, like I was fascinated, moving these giant [00:55:00] facilities, 10,000 tons.

There’s a crane vessel now that can lift 20,000 tons almost. Wow. So like I was I was fascinated. So like I just had to find a mix of what I was curious about and what I like to do, and then find out a little more about those engineering disciplines. And it just slotted it right in perfectly for me.

[00:55:19] Orion Matthews: And I think then also what’s interesting about what you, what we’ve said here is we’re like mentioning that like businesses we’re in a time of flux. The way that these things are done is not the way that they were done before. And it’s like younger people are the torch bearers that come in and share an a, an energy of change that’s needed in this space right now.

So I guess like I would think that if you’re young and you’re like, I don’t have anything to contribute, it’s like hearing our conversation. It’s like obviously there’s a lot of things that are going to be changing and the younger folks [00:56:00] coming in. Are really good at that. So it’s a really great time to get into the energy space, even though if you look at it from afar, maybe you’re thinking, oh, it’s in flux.

That’s a bad sign. It’s actually maybe one of the best signs. Yeah,

[00:56:11] James Wiseman: yeah. Like the newer generations of workers they don’t, like if they see a way of doing things that they think is dumb, they’ll just wanna do a better, do it a better way. It’s this is dumb. I don’t wanna do it this way, I wanna do it this way.

And you get some really great innovation there. And so you just have to be able to say this is the goal. This is what we wanna do. You guys are much better at me than innovating and finding these new ways of working. Go forth and do it. And usually if you just set out the objective and the goal people are just incredible at finding really cool ways to do things.

Yeah. Now that’s so much fun. Yeah. The reason that solar and battery storage is like accelerating and like really penetrating the market right now is if you compare it to other, like large mechanical things, like a wind [00:57:00] turbine is large, it’s just a large mechanical device. It spins around, turns a generator.

Those are, there’s like just not a lot of room for improvement and they, you, they can only get so big. Yeah. Wheel and like wheels only with oil and gas, there’s yeah, you can drill so many wells and get the bigger facilities, but there’s some limits there. But like with like microelectronics solar panels and batteries there really isn’t a limit there.

There’s a technical limit. I think it’s like. I don’t remember. I think it’s one kilowatt per square meter maybe from the sun and like we’re gonna get there. And it’s like really is following Moore’s Law where if you look at like a solar panel from five years ago and like the size, cost, and output and compare it to one today, it’s amazing.

And look at cost and capacity for batteries. It’s the same situation. If you look at gosh, I don’t know, just a little like lithium iron phosphate, LFP battery for [00:58:00] your trail, your camper. Yeah. Like that used to cost a thousand dollars and they were big and heavy and now they cost like $300 and they’re small and light.

And and that has happened really quickly. So I can see how remember how I talked about how you need to make like. All of your electricity in eight hours and store it for the rest of the time.

[00:58:21] Orion Matthews: Right.

[00:58:22] James Wiseman: Or even longer. So like I can see that as being possible.

[00:58:27] Orion Matthews: It’s interesting because we’re at a time where I think people don’t think about it like that, but there seems like there’s an inflection point.

If you drive a Tesla, it’s like 300 to 400 miles is your range. And there’s still range anxiety. That’s not quite enough for everybody. But if you double that and you get the same performance out of that same power to weight ratio, battery pack and Moore’s law is about doubling every seven years, I

[00:58:53] James Wiseman: believe.

I don’t recall the period. Yeah,

[00:58:55] Orion Matthews: yeah. Yep. It’s not that long. It’s that changes everything. If you have a car that can [00:59:00] go 800 miles, if you can store that much power, and I didn’t realize that’s true as well on the solar, that there’s more to gain from the actual. Cells as they’re capturing the light.

Huge. And that’s following Moore’s Law as well. That’s really cool.

[00:59:16] James Wiseman: Yeah, another example that with that, with the panels is like if you were an early adopter and you put a 10 kilowatt solar array on your roof I don’t know, let’s just say it’s 30 panels, maybe 35, something like that.

And then. Today, like you were getting maybe 200, 250 watts per panel.

Today, the exact same size panel, same configuration. You could be getting twice that.

[00:59:40] Orion Matthews (2): Wow.

[00:59:40] James Wiseman: And to replace your panels with the new ones. It like, it makes economic sense. It’s amazing. So you can go out there, you’ve got the same rack, you’ve got the same size panels.

Do you like, as long as your inverters are right and everything, or you may need a few more, but you can like, unplug your old panels, bolt down your new panels, and you can [01:00:00] like, double your production. Wow. Like people people are starting to realize they can do that and now that they’re gonna wanna charge their car at home or charge their batteries to, to, to power something later, they’re starting to realize, oh my gosh, this is like literally that doubling you were talking about.

I was trying to convince my parents in San Diego to do it. Yeah. Because they, they have the, early adopters and have the old panels and it’s just remarkable how far it’s come and how simple it is.

[01:00:25] Orion Matthews: What do you think? There’s an inflection point where like, how I for example, I know that there’s lithium ion and their solid state batteries are maybe coming.

There’s other liquid states that they’re working on as well. I think that Tesla’s more interested in. But do you think there’s some inflection point in the future that we’re gonna hit that’s gonna cause a major shift in the economy? Like with

[01:00:52] James Wiseman: battery tech? I wouldn’t even try, I wouldn’t even try and guess on that one.

If you just look at like energy density Orion like a [01:01:00] gallon of diesel fuel, just just kicks. Kicks the butt of every other kind of energy storage right now, a gallon of diesel fuel has so much energy in it compared to say it weighs six pounds or whatever, six pounds of batteries, like not even close.

And so we’ve got a long ways to improve, and but if you just use a light duty car, a family car as an example, like they’re pretty darn good now. Yeah. I’m not sure we may even be past the inflection point with some things.

[01:01:29] Orion Matthews (2): But

[01:01:30] James Wiseman: Are we ever gonna have an electric boat or an electric aircraft?

That energy density may just never be there

[01:01:35] Orion Matthews: for that. If you can do it with I guess the question starts to become, are you building a bomb or are you building a battery? That’s the trick on energy storage is to make sure there’s no runaway catalyst situation. So maybe that’s.

It’s tricky because I think that gallon of diesel fuel is a bomb in a way. So maybe there’s some leeway there, but I’m

[01:01:58] James Wiseman: hopeful. Yeah. Gasoline is, [01:02:00] gasoline has a lot of energy density too, and it is a bomb.

[01:02:02] Orion Matthews: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:02:03] James Wiseman: It’s just how you look at it, anytime you’re gonna get all that energy in one spot, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be dangerous if not handled properly.

But just going back to your question on the inflection point it’s like when people don’t even notice what kind of energy they’re using is when you know it’s succeeding. Yeah. Right now. Like the barriers that are like in holding back, like adoption of electric cars. If people can just fill up a, fill up an electric car, just like they fill up a gasoline or diesel vehicle, they don’t see the difference there.

It’s like literally I don’t know, plug in for, two minutes and you’re charged.

[01:02:42] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah. Great.

[01:02:43] James Wiseman: And if there’s a electric charger on the every corner that there’s a gas station, people won’t notice that anymore. Nobody wants to be stranded. When you’re stranded right now you can get AAA to come, bring you some gas.

[01:02:56] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah. If

[01:02:56] James Wiseman: you’re not a good planner. And so there’s a solution [01:03:00] there. The electric solutions are starting to come out. They’re not super good yet, but like AAA will bring a little trailer with batteries and they will charge your car now.

[01:03:08] Orion Matthews (2): Oh,

[01:03:08] James Wiseman: really? So yeah. Yeah. Really not everywhere, but like a lot of places they will.

So like when you don’t even notice what form of engineering you’ve used is when you’re at that point. So there’s a cell phones, right? I don’t know, just for fun. Yeah, you gotta look at the Nissan Leaf ad. What if everything ran on gasoline and the guy’s got his cell phone and there’s a little two stroke engine and it’s put putting smoke out the top and obviously like little like micro, like little devices now.

None of them need to everything just runs on batteries and electricity now.

[01:03:40] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah, it’s

[01:03:41] James Wiseman: Cool. I was just thinking about that the other day how instead of bringing like a little battery powered generator camping with you nowadays a lot of people just bring one of those little battery solar things and throw up a couple of solar panels on a kickstand.

Yeah. When that gets to be like replacing people’s generators then, we’ll start to see a inflection point there too. [01:04:00]

[01:04:00] Orion Matthews: Yeah. We’re, I do, I have one of those arias that I take camping, and it’s actually pretty fantastic. And you can throw up a little solar panel and charge it up if you need it.

And it has a lot of energy, like just a small little suitcase, little carrying size battery. Yeah.

[01:04:18] James Wiseman: Probably one kilowatt hour right there. Yeah. But yeah and it’s just, being able to keep it topped up and filled. People worry about stuff like that. Yeah. So yeah. The best way is to just try it out and play around.

Unfortunately, it’s not free to try those things out.

[01:04:32] Orion Matthews: I think as people I know this from getting, having an electric car, there is a, people make that shift to electric and it’s it does, I would not wanna go back to a cell phone that’s put putting, and I still have a minivan for hauling my kids around.

But the electric car has a place in my life now and has for 10 years and I wanna. Keep doing that because because it’s just a better solution. It’s more optimal and you can feel [01:05:00] the environmental benefits of it. You, it’s I know with manufacturing it’s not completely clean, but the the health effects of using just electric and starting to sort, phase out some of those other energy sources when they’re close to you, like gasoline is nice.

[01:05:18] James Wiseman: It is, it, it’s never gonna take over until it’s the best solution for everyone. Like there are a lot of people that like, are just happy to do something good for the environment but that doesn’t mean that the platform will succeed. Like when it works better than an internal combustion vehicle.

And when people are like making those kind of choices when they go to buy a new one, that’s when you know that it’s successful. Yeah. And so yeah, there’s still a long way to go in a lot of areas, but yeah, someday we’re gonna be like able to cut the cord on electric electricity, like coming into your house, you’re not, like just getting an electrical connection for a major facility right now is very difficult.

People are gonna be wanting to [01:06:00] make their own energy and electricity. So there’s just a lot of cool things being done right now. Like the Costco projects I worked on, I forgot to tell you about those. We’ll have to mix this in here somehow is like Costco, literally like they’re building so fast they could not get a lot enough electricity to their facilities

[01:06:18] Orion Matthews: really.

[01:06:19] James Wiseman: So like they just said, we’re gonna generate our own where we can. And so they’ve gone all in, in a few places on batteries and storage for their facilities so they can continue to build and they, ’cause they just can’t do that five year wait to get like a. Five megawatt ba electricity connection.

[01:06:36] Orion Matthews: Yeah. And

[01:06:37] James Wiseman: so they’re going for it. So like you can imagine a big giant Costco warehouse, perfect place to put the solar panels up and put the battery storage in the back and,

[01:06:45] Orion Matthews: yeah.

[01:06:46] James Wiseman: Good to go.

[01:06:47] Orion Matthews: They have a lot of space. So

[01:06:48] James Wiseman: space, when it gets to be like that, where you’re not even connected to the grid anymore, then you know you’re winning.

[01:06:53] Orion Matthews: I, I’ve also, and I don’t remember where this came from, so maybe I’m spreading rumors, but I believe they’re working on [01:07:00] changing the regulations for what constitutes who can build power plants. Because a lot of these data centers are drawing so much outta the city grids that the, maybe Microsoft wants to be able to build a nuclear reactor right next to their giant data center and generate their own power for that, which would be a really great solution.

So you’re starting to see going from a single massive controlled system to a decentralized. System where. Effectively, we all have mitochondria in our body. We as organically have come up with that model and I think that’s where we’ll probably end up on a civilization wild scale as well.

[01:07:43] James Wiseman: Yeah. A lot of distributed stuff.

One thing we also didn’t talk about yet is the fact that, to do all these things we’re talking about, we need a lot of materials.

[01:07:51] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah. You

[01:07:52] James Wiseman: know, and there’s so many companies right now that are emerging and they have materials in their name that whether they’re like recycling old [01:08:00] materials for repurposing like batteries or just coming up with new materials for magnets or motors or electrical components like that is a huge area.

And for people also looking to like transition out of one career field into another one or start something new like materials mining. Processing and deployment is exploding right now. Like it is a, it is just anybody that’s interested in that will be able to find a place.

[01:08:29] Orion Matthews: Tell us about that space.

I want to hear more about I, ’cause it’s not a space that I’ve really dipped my toe into. So when you talk about materials manufacturing, there’s like academic research going into what kind of materials can be used and then there’s the actual like mining for rare earths and things like that. Maybe can you break that down for us a little bit?

[01:08:52] James Wiseman: Sure. The simplest one is just copper and iron. Yeah, like of course like we just need so much more copper [01:09:00] than anybody can mine and make right now, getting the aura out of the ground is kinda the mining part. The processing part is getting it into copper that you can put into wires and cabling.

So that’s when I mean processing. That’s it. And so those are the really simple ones, but if you look into there’s a lot of talk lately about critical minerals and rare earth elements.

[01:09:19] Orion Matthews (2): Yeah. And

[01:09:20] James Wiseman: They’re some of those they’re not actually rare.

Like lithium is not rare. It’s everywhere. Okay. But getting it into a form that you can use in a battery is difficult. Takes a lot of processing. So those areas are where they’re needing to draw in more talent right now is getting so, so the different materials that we’re talking about are all over the place, but like a lot of ’em have to do with like microprocessing motors instead of, driving a crankshaft with, gasoline.

Everybody wants to do it with motorists now, but like the magnets and the components of a motor need a lot of these elements. So that’s like an example.

[01:09:59] Orion Matthews: And then why [01:10:00] is it so difficult, to refine these elements? What is tough about are we talking about lithium or like other things like beryllium or just random Yeah.

Cobalt, manganese. Pick stuff off the periodic table here. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:10:13] James Wiseman: Like you should just search critical minerals. I did it the other day when I was giving a presentation about it which ones are found in Alaska? Everyone on the list is found in Alaska

[01:10:21] Orion Matthews: Alaska should have a boom around those.

It’s

[01:10:23] James Wiseman: got a lot of good materials up here. So yes they have to be very pure and giving them to a pure state that you can use in something is just, requires a lot of processing and some of the older ways of making like lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide or a lot of, let’s just not even use lithium.

A lot of the, a mineral processing like uses like an acid roasting step. And you end up with a huge waste product at the end of that. So like when people talk about, oh, refining all these rare earths and everything is so dirty. There are dirty ways to do it. [01:11:00] And there’s probably, there are a few, like much cleaner ways that have been invented recently and really we need to pivot to those.

But when people talk about dirty rare earth processing, it’s ’cause yeah. Acid roasting and all these byproducts like, please don’t do it that way if you can

[01:11:16] Orion Matthews: help

[01:11:16] James Wiseman: it.

[01:11:17] Orion Matthews: So really it’s take a shovel just for me ’cause I’m a simple tenant about everything. You’re saying like, you shovel throw a bunch of acid into a vat in a way, or heat it up to high temperature along with a bunch of dirt.

And then out the other side comes, there’s some separation that might go on. And then you have all this sort of like acid laced. Dirt essentially as a byproduct that you then dump. I think as you’re you simplest

[01:11:45] James Wiseman: level, that’s pretty much what happens. Yeah. Okay. So you’ve got this, or, and it has a lot of different things in it.

It’s a crushed rock that you crushed it up. Yeah. And you wanna get the ions out that you need. So the best way to break something down to a bunch of ions is just to just drop it in [01:12:00] acid.

[01:12:00] Orion Matthews: Yeah.

[01:12:00] James Wiseman: And then all that, all the ions are released and floating around an acid solution, and then you like stuck out the ions that you need, right?

Yeah. And then you end up with the waste product afterwards. So there, there’s, there are much better ways to get what you need

[01:12:14] Orion Matthews: out of a solution. And the better ways are more expensive. Is that why? And ’cause of refineries aren’t usually at least, speaking from the US’ side, but like I don’t hear a lot of talk about those.

Manu the, I guess maybe that’s a new emergent field that we’re just starting to see pop up. Yeah, no Tesla,

[01:12:34] James Wiseman: Tesla’s way of getting lith useful. Lithium out of the ore is really awesome. It uses a pressure leaching and they’ve talked about this publicly, so it’s not like proprietary, but they use a better way to, to release the lithium.

And more people should do that. And is it more expensive? That’s a really good question. It’s like when you factor in the cleanup of the byproducts it, you gotta compare on equal footing. But yeah, that’s one, [01:13:00] direct lithium extraction is cool.

Like for years people have just been using like activated carbon. It just looks like black granules of coal, but it’s activated carbon and you can absorb things into that and then you can get ’em back out later. So there, but there’s many, like more high tech media now. Where you can absorb the things that you need and then you can wash ’em out of your media to use.

So that is a really cool field right now. Wow. To get into. Yep.

[01:13:29] Orion Matthews: And so these rare earths, like where’s the science of those new techniques getting developed? Is it all over like it’s all over. It’s smart

[01:13:37] James Wiseman: chemical engineers that are all over the place, industrial engineers, chemical and mechanical that are coming in and chemists that are inventing it from, the science research part, ’cause research development, pilot kind of scale kind of thing.

[01:13:52] Orion Matthews: So a rare earth sort of race or there’s maybe there’s a Moore’s law for [01:14:00] refining min rare earth sort of minerals into useful product without the. Hazardous byproducts is hopefully following that seven year doubling Yep. Trend as well.

[01:14:13] James Wiseman: There are a lot of ways to do it better.

Orion.

[01:14:15] Orion Matthews: Yeah.

[01:14:15] James Wiseman: And that’s where people should focus their energy and curiosity and attention. And I think, this is, we’re talking about projects and engineers now and yeah, there’s a big problem, there’s a big prize if it can be solved and like smart people should work on it.

[01:14:31] Orion Matthews: I think communities are a little afraid that I am see that it doesn’t, a lot of people don’t want a processing facility in their neighborhood because it was so dirty for that, I guess all of human history until recently that we’ve been able to do these things better. So it’s good that we’re getting the word out a little bit, that these technologies are coming up and they are not.

They are becoming economically competitive, particularly when you factor in the total cost of remediation. [01:15:00] Exactly. Like in, in Oregon we have these these old mining situa. We have lakes that just are filled with awful

[01:15:11] James Wiseman: tails.

[01:15:11] Orion Matthews: Yep. Yeah. Tailings and it, and the plan that we, that I think everybody does in that situation is just to not disturb it.

But really we’ve socialized the law. Those companies are all gone. They don’t exist. So there’s the it’s a new generation. It’s, the kids of Oregon are going to have to solve that problem, but the, so the economic cost of that was never modeled in the 1840s or whatever when they were like doing their their stuff.

So I do think there’s a lot of I think that the cost of environmental cleanup can really factor in a lot of times. Or you just don’t wanna socialize those losses on and when there’s a better option. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:15:48] James Wiseman: I’m a hundred percent behind that one.

[01:15:51] Orion Matthews: Awesome. Was there any other little things from that presentation you said you just went through rare Earth’s presentation. Did, was there an upshot to your [01:16:00] presentation? Were you making a case for doing a big project or what was the Oh, yeah,

[01:16:08] James Wiseman: yeah, absolutely. I’m sure if you read the news now, you know that we’ve outsourced this kind of work to other countries.

There are a lot of things that we use that we aren’t, that we aren’t like ref processing and refining ourselves. And like we’re exposed. If you were to like, just throw down a big curtain at the Pacific and the big curtain at the Atlantic, we would have trouble like building what we need. Yeah.

And critical minerals, rare earths and processing and making things here in the US is like a great idea. And we’re smart. We’ve got a lot of good people that can do it. We’ve got people that wanna do it and like we, we just need the like drive to do it ourselves. Like it’s a little bit of a dirty job.

And so we should want to do some dirty jobs like this. Yeah. It’s gonna be good for our [01:17:00] country and good for our kids and like careers for people.

[01:17:04] Orion Matthews: Yeah, I think Alaska will be a good place to potentially pull some of those projects off too. I hope that happens. I think so too.

[01:17:11] James Wiseman: We’ve got so much coastline in Alaska, a lot of these things you need a coastline for. And we have in Alaska, two times the coastline of the whole, of the United, rest of the United States.

[01:17:24] Orion Matthews: Yeah.

[01:17:25] James Wiseman: Lot of opportunity there.

[01:17:27] Orion Matthews: The future is going to be very cool and I really appreciate you taking the time to come on here.

On the video you can see I have this giant beam of light that has been hitting my face. I think it’s like a sign that solar power and renewables are the future, and perhaps solar in general if you’re wondering what to go into. But I think thank you James for coming on. If people wanna get in touch with you or wanna connect with you do you have a LinkedIn?

Is there a good way to to connect with you that way?

[01:17:58] James Wiseman: Oh, thanks for asking Ryan. I do, I [01:18:00] do. I really talking to people in other industries and just bouncing ideas. I’d love to hear from other folks. I’m really easy to find on LinkedIn. There aren’t a lot of James Wisemans on there. You’ll be able to find me right away.

I actually do look like my picture on there too, which, sometimes rare, but yeah I’d love to, I’d love to hear from folks. Please connect, and if we get a chance to meet in person, even

[01:18:22] Orion Matthews: better. Fantastic. James, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I learned so much today about leadership, energy, people, projects, lithium, geothermal, fracking.

It’s been a great conversation and I really appreciate your time today. It’s great to see you. Thank you so much for coming on.

[01:18:42] James Wiseman: Thank you, Ryan. I really appreciate being here.

[01:18:45] Host: Thanks for listening to the Major Project podcast. Be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts and learn more at the major project podcast.com.

Until next time, keep building [01:19:00] big.