If you google this you will find the following:

The key methods for cleaning up oil spills are:

Booms -- Floating barriers placed around the oil or around whatever is leaking the oil. Booms contain the oil so skimmers can collect it.

Skimmers -- Boats, vacuum machines, and oil-absorbent plastic ropes that skim spilled oil from the water's surface after booms have corralled it. The skimmer collects oil into a container so it can be removed.

Chemical dispersants -- Materials that break down the oil into its chemical constituents. This helps disperse the oil and make it less harmful to wildlife and shorelines.

In-situ burning -- Igniting freshly spilled oil while it's still floating on the water.

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Ok, about a week ago I was out and met this guy who works for a company called Koch Membrane. I was listening to him discuss his company and I asked him about the products that they manufacture. Hearing his explanation of how these membranes can be used I asked if there could be a practical application for cleaning up oil spills like the one in the Gulf, he said of course there was. Basically the sea water and oil can pass through the membrane and it separates the oil from the water as easy as a hot knife sliding through butter. In fact he said many big oil companies already use some of their products but he was not certain who or what applications the membrane was being used for other than it was probably being used to separate oil from different substances.

So, I went home, curiosity aroused, and began to research how they go out and clean up these spills, as it generally looks like a disaster that they don't really have a good handle on.

Here was the idea I had in my head, emergency response vessels that are basically coastal tankers (with a capacity to hold 3000 metric tons or 906,000 gallons for us Americans- this is I believe a small tanker) equipped with a high tech vacuum system that sucks the spill up out of the ocean, passes it through the membrane separating the oil and sea water, dumping the oil into the tankers holding tanks and ejecting the water back into the ocean.

Now, there would not be much difficulty with the oil/water separation system and I guess the engineering issue would be the vacuum system and its capacity for how much water and oil it would have the ability to suck into this system. There would probably be some issues with this that might effect sea life in the area of the spill but I would think cleaning the spill in this way would probably save a lot more sea life than it would harm.

Perhaps something like this already exists or perhaps I'm just blowing smoke and some engineer has already calculated that this system would not work but at least in theory, in my head, it seems pretty feasible and a far better way to attack this kind of thing than dumping more chemicals into our oceans.

Obviously as noted above "boats and vacuum machines" are being used but I wonder what the scale is of these boats and if this has been considered. I only wonder because it seems that in my reading we have not done much to advance the technology for oil spill clean up in the last 50 years.

These don't look like what I had in mind:

http://www.mavideniz.com.tr/product/Oil_recovery_Vessel/Oil_recovery_Vessel.html

I do think this is such a simple idea somebody other than me has likely thought of it and I probably just sound like a jackass once again.