Modon: Most projects reach final investment decision with 30% engineering complete
Alex Modon · Can AI revolutionize EPC? · Dec 11, 2025 · at 16:04
Unlimited Industries CEO Alex Modon explains front-end engineering design (FEED) dynamics and cost certainty in capital construction projects to Shayle Kann.
0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In the vast majority of projects, when you go to final investment decision and you have plus or -10% estimates, you're only maybe 30% of the way through your engineering. 70%, you still have to go do.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Modon
Modon: EPCs reject better software because efficiency cuts billable hours
“There's no real incentive structure for an EPC to want better software. It's the same reason your law firm doesn't necessarily want like AI software to help them accelerate, you know, and reduce their billables.”
Modon: Unlimited Industries prohibits change orders in its contracts
“We literally put, like, no change orders in our contracts.”
Modon: Unlimited completes 100% of engineering upfront before committing to price
“We've been able to not only Kind of like remove all that extra risk by taking the definition instead of, you know, doing that at 30%, we can take that definition all the way through a hundred percent.”
Modon: Fixed-firm EPC contracts use scope loopholes to trigger change orders
“Most of these fixed firms aren't really like industry themselves. I mean, we've seen time and time again where it's like a fixed firm doesn't really mean a fixed firm because there's inevitably some way that in the thousand page contract that you assigned with…”
Modon: High engineering costs force projects into single-pass local optima
“Because again, such a high marginal cost to engineering, what you end up doing is you only really design something one pass through. There's no sort of iteration. There's no optimization of design. And that leads you to a spot where you kind of make early deci…”
Modon: Treating construction projects as one-offs eliminates learning curve benefits
“When we move into projects world, everything's a snowflake. It's like, you know, everything's end of one. Even a project that we're building, you know, we built lots of refineries. That next refinery that we build is still an end of one project. And because it…”