Oil is still pouring out of the hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Lots of people are working to try and stop the leak, and lots more are trying to clean up the mess. It may be weeks or even months before they manage to stop the leak. It might be never. This could end up being a worse environmental disaster than Chernobyl. Then again, they might plug the leak this afternoon, or it might stop spewing oil all by itself. Who knows? The future is cloudy, I cannot see.
Meanwhile, if we can't stop the leak, we might be able to do something to mitigate the damage being done by the oil. Here's my big idea.
Offer a bounty for each barrel of oil recovered. With the amount of oil being spilled, it should be easy to scoop up some fraction of it. Each barrel recovered is that much less environmental damage and that much less clean up required. Also, it might be possible to separate out the water from the recovered oil and use the resulting oil as oil.
We would need some place to receive the collected oil. Possibly a tanker on site along with a floating dock, pumps and lines to transfer the collected oil from the collector to the tanker. And then we would need a method to separate the oil from the water.
The only question is how much of a bounty would it take to make a difference? I think a thousand dollars a barrel would probably pull every boat within a hundred miles of the Gulf Coast into this operation. A dollar a barrel? Well, maybe a couple of guys in a Greenpeace skiff. Somewhere in between there I think we could get measurable results for less than the national defense budget.
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