Peter Lovie remembers well his late 1990s road trips to the towns of the US Gulf coast with an unusual companion — a six-foot model of the Glas Dowr floating production, storage and offloading unit.

The veteran engineer took the unit on the back of a truck to places from Corpus Christi to Lafayette as a key part of an environmental impact study that paved the way to bring FPSOs to the US offshore.

Bringing