ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 15 -- United States Patent no. 12,600,443, issued on April 14, was assigned to Chevron U.S.A. Inc. (San Ramon, Calif.).
"Floating unit with under keel tank" was invented by Wei Ma (Houston), Fei Yang (Houston), Jack Darryl Payne (Spring, Texas), Peter Leitch (Houston), Renjian Roger Lu (Houston), Tao Wang (Katy, Texas), Jon Husby (Houston) and Erling Storaune (Houston).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A tank is secured under the keel of a floating structure for offshore energy development. The tank is filled with ballast material that supplements or replaces the ballast already present on the floating structure, thereby gaining larger topsides payload capacity for the floa...