A Report Card on Italy’s Eni for Petroleum Economist’s May issue. Full thing here.

If it is to achieve its ambitions, Eni must restore its reputation as a company capable of managing big projects, writes Derek Brower

ITALY’S Eni has always felt a bit like the younger brother. Its founder, Enrico Mattei, famously described the large dominant oil companies of the post-World War Two era as “the seven sisters” and Eni has tried ever since to break into the clique. With a market capitalisation of €88bn ($138bn), it is at the bottom edge of the group, rivalling ConocoPhillips for size, but remains very much the junior sibling to the other big sisters in the family.

Humiliatingly for Eni, that status was confirmed again earlier this year in Kazakhstan. The company became operator of the Kashagan oilfield development in the Caspian Sea in 2001, leading a group of supermajors, including BP, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell and Total. One of the largest oilfields discovered in the last three decades, Kashagan was proclaimed as a jewel in the crown – both for Kazakhstan and for Eni, which emerged as the compromise candidate to become its operator.

Failure at Kashagan

“Kashagan is our test,” the company’s previous chief executive, Vittorio Mincato, said in 2005. But by 2007, Eni had failed its exam. (…)