HOUSTON—The recent shock of English football—Leicester City winning the English Premier League despite 5,000- to-1 odds stacked against it—shows how far focus can take a team.

Chevron Corp. is arguably at the top of its league in the Gulf of Mexico, where it is the largest leaseholder and produces 140,000 bbl/d.

Yet the company sees gaps between where it is and the goal line and cannot help but fret.

“Bluntly, we’re finding it too often where we don’t have the necessary competencies, the technical competency, to do the engineering that we need to do to complete these projects,” said Mick Kraly, Chevron’s general manager of facilities engineering. Kraly spoke Tuesday at an OTC luncheon.

Large projects have become immensely complex, with engineering, inspections, fabrication, construction, precommissioning and startup demonstrating a “lack of depth in the competencies we really need.”

But Kraly sees parallels to Leicester City as the model for thriving.

As Chevron and other deepwater operators push farther and deeper into the water to reach areas of optimal return, an unbalanced stack of concerns have built up like paperwork on an untidy desk. Suppliers, engineering and safety concerns only grow as new technology—while ultimately valuable—can lead to optimism that may blind operators to risk.

“A lot of our projects now are bigger, larger and harder to reach,” Kraly said, with more complicated supply changes making Chevron “rethink things.”

While Chevron’s brownfield projects have single-well breakevens typically in the $20 to $40 Brent range, greenfield developments have been more difficult, Joe Geagea, Chevron’s executive vice president of technology, projects and services said in a May 1 conference call.

“Obviously we need scale in the resource, but we also need to rethink about how we bring our development,” Geagea said.

Chevron is considering optimizing development concepts.

“This is another place where we actually need our suppliers,” he said. “We need to work closely with them to continue to drive the cost down.”

Kraly said the complexity of projects is increasingly a hurdle, one that has it bringing aspects of engineering back inside the company; working closely with suppliers toward standardization and even reworking the basic metallurgy it uses.

Chevron measures its ability to successfully manage a project using the International Project Agreement standards of schedule, cost and production attainment— reaching Chevron’s prediction of first year production.

Among selected projects, Kraly said cost and schedule problems, which often are intertwined, disrupted many projects.

“At the very end, only 8% [of projects] meet cost, schedule and production attainment. From an industry perspective is probably why we’re here today,” he said.

Adjustments are essential, Kraly said.

“If we don’t change, obviously in this low price environment many projects are not going to be viable,” he said.

Kraly, sounding somewhat like a coach, said Chevron and other deepwater drillers have to come together, innovate and return to basics.

“We have to do what Leicester City has done, go back to basics, back to what you do fundamentally to be really ultimately successful,” he said.

Darren Barbee can be reached at dbarbee@hartenergy.com.