I find it pretty hard to imagine that any savvy businessman in this day and age would make a large, long-term investment into anything, unless there were some specific guarantees made, and that the move made economic sense.
Building, and flagging a vessel in the U.S., unless you absolutely have to, makes no sense from a financial point of view. We are one of the most expensive flags to fly, and we have a heavier tax burden than 90% of the rest of the maritime world.
What incentive would any ship owner have to building here, unless he had no alternative to do so contractually, or for legal reasons?
We build OSV’s and AHTS’s in the U.S., because we have to. Cargo has to get from the dock, to the rig/platform, the anchors need to be set, and the rigs need to be moved. Most Offshore companies learned early on that the most cost effective way of doing this, was to have your own shipyards, and to manage your costs as well as you can.
A few companies had the facilities to make the right moves, yet chose not to (McDermott, Tidewater to name two), and now we don’t have the equipment here at home to do what needs to be done. Until the mess from the hurricanes gets cleaned up, they are here to stay, that I can assure you - with the caveat that you get the laws changed, or you convince one of the majors to build the boats and rigs to take over from the foreign fleet. Neither seems very likely anytime in the near future. The Boy Scouts don’t run the oil companies, and most of those oil companies have stockholders to answer to. I guarantee that they’ll do whatever it is that they have to do to get the job done, and that means utilizing every tool, loophole, and waiver that they can.
Equally, we utilize loopholes as a maritime nation to our advantage every day. When we need to “in-flag” a vessel for our convenience, we have no compunction about doing so. Better than 60% of the vessels getting MSP (Maritime Security Program) operating subsidies today were foreign bottoms, brought in and re-flagged U.S. No one kicked and screamed on that one, did they? No, they didn’t. Why? Because it suited everybody’s purpose.
All of the vessels that I mentioned in my previous post that I sailed with, or on, in the North Sea were U.S. Flag. We cleared into Norway, put on board a Fisheries Representative for our operation, and did our work. Some of that work was for then Norsk Hydro, and StatOil, along with several U.S. majors with operations there at the time, one of which was ExxonMobil. We were there, it wasn’t a figment of anyone’s imagination, it wasn’t a maybe or anything else except what I described. That is wasn’t yesterday isn’t something that can be helped. We were certainly well treated, and even hosted to great luncheon by the Commander of the Norwegian Southern Command in Stavanger. Actually, thinking about it, we were treated better than we’ve treated our compatriots during their stay here.
One of the biggest problems we had though was the equipment. An old Norwegian saying goes like this: “There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes”. That premise holds true for equipment as well. Our vessels, although they were brand new at the time, had a hard time in the North Sea environment. They weren’t built with the North sea in mind, nor were they as equipped as they could have been for working in Northern Europe during the autumn and winter. We did get the job done, and I only tell you this story to show you that there [B]IS[/B] a reason why there aren’t more U.S. built OSV’s/PSV’s/AHTS’s in the North Sea, and in particular Norway and Scotland.
Those companies that do go there, go there with a plan. Only four companies in the GOM, IMHO, have the vessels that could go to the North Sea right now- Candies, Chouest, Tidewater, and Hornbeck. And Hornbeck chose to bring the Achiever back to the U.S. to work in the GOM. What does that tell you?
I admire your tenacity for sticking up for American Seafaring jobs. I do believe however, that we need to spend a lot less time worrying about what the competition is doing here on a limited basis, and for a limited time, and spend more time worrying about how we’re going to bring our industry up to the same standards as the rest of the world. We can address the legislative flaws that you feel need addressing, but we should fix our own backyard before we tell anyone else how bad theirs looks.
Imagine what we could’ve accomplished with the energy exerted in this thread??