The federal government hasn’t required oil companies to invest in spill cleanup technology, so the tools used today are about the same as they were 40 years ago, The Washington Post reports.
After a 1969 spill off the California coast, people skimmed oil off the surface, used chemicals to disperse it and tried to soak it up with materials like straw. The three main methods used to clean up the growing spill in the Gulf of Mexico — chemical dispersants, floating plastic booms and burning the oil on the surface — are equally low-tech.
From The Post:
The reason little has changed, said Byron W. King, an energy analyst at Agora Financial, is a “failure of imagination.”
“The industry says it never had a blowout,” he said, and as a result the oil “industry is not going to spend good money on problems that it says aren’t there.” But King said that “you need new technology to deal with the problems that your other new technology got you.” And he said that the federal government, instead of just collecting its royalties, should have made sure that research took place.
