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Smith, Eric N's avatar

One point to remember is that many of those potential inland workers are acculturated to union shop conditions. In the US oil and gas industry, offshore field workers and even the supporting shipyards, (other than those working for the military) are not union. Admittedly, other countries do have union shops for their oil and gas operations. The US dominated offshore development without that attribute.

Secondly, the Jones Act, and earlier cabotage laws, have been successful in gutting the maritime world of international competitiveness. Step one should be to allow foreign built ships to be US flagged for strategic, point to point, transportation. We can use the Military Sealift Command as a template. For decades their fleet has been sourced from foreign shipyards, but flagged and crewed under Jones Act rules. Borrowing from the Asian model, we could gradually supply more and bigger modules to those foreign assembly yards, e.g. power trains, thruster3s, cranes, DP software, drilling packages etc.

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