The tools that were used three decades ago — dispersants, Coast Guard cutter-towed booms, and centrifuge pumps — have barely evolved since with almost no new tools added to the process. That is an amazing fact, especially when Norway had developed an efficient and eco-friendly oil recovery system in the Euroskimmer by the late 1970s. But the Euroskimmer with its catamaran hull and “disc-adhesion” oil collecting device was abandoned some years later due to a lack of use. So after six weeks of failing to contain the oil spill, let alone clean it up, neither BP nor the U.S. government had any plan in place to cleanup a major oil spill. ..... ..... One area has seen the billions of dollars made by the supmajors invested in new technology to drill deeper and extract oil in harder to reach places, but not in mitigating the risk of a potential catastrophic failure. Hundreds of millions of dollars more have gone toward upgrading old technology: GPS, geology mapping software, sensors, wireless connectivity. Nothing, however, was spent to improve the “tools” used to cleanup oil spills, which were used in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico in 1979.
I think that with new technologies, the cleanup of this mess will take much less time and cause far less sustained ecological (but probably not economical, due to its location close to wider and more populated coastline) damage than the equivalent of Exxon-Valdez. Engineers of BP and other companies will do most of the work, but Obama and Democrats will take the credit for successes and "kicking ass".
Obama is a small man, with small ideas and an even smaller imagination. He will be a speed bump or stumbling block, but society will give him his 15 minutes of fame or notoriety and then move on to make the great steps forward from the lessons learned.