Capital Financing & Project Management

The global energy industry is highly capital intensive. Decisions about capital investment need to consider future developments over decades and can be characterised by great uncertainty. Delivery of major projects is critical to company performance and their relationship with the nations where they operate.

In this module, you will take an integrated view of capital budgeting, financing, and project management. Capital budgeting tools seek to improve investment decision making. You will explore variants of real options as well as conventional payback and DCF methods.

The seeds for successful project management are often sown in the development and financing of projects and so you will explore how the organisational process of capital budgeting influences activity plans during project execution.

You will study three examples of large scale capital investment: oil and gas fields, power plants, and renewable energy projects. The examples will highlight how investment in the energy industry cannot be managed or delivered with standard techniques alone but needs to be seen in the context of specific finance solutions, project management practices, relationships between firm, and national and international policies.

Topics covered include:

The economics of capital budgeting
Key principles of finance for large investments in the energy sector
Effective project management
Theory of mediating instruments in an investment context
Usefulness of financial information for different investment contexts.

By the end of this module you will be able to:

Relate capital budgeting to the successful financing and delivery of major projects
Understand the key principles of financing large investments in the energy sector
Analyse how investment context relates to effective project management
Understand the theory of mediating instruments in an investment context.