Thanks for doing those calculations, Dave. Yeah, I'm always skeptical when an idea seems too simple, especially if I dream it up while having cocktails, and even in that magical alcohol tinged moment I knew the first giant obstacle would be the pumping/vacuum system that would likely be required to do this. When my head gets hold of something though sometimes it just won't let go and so I figured these "emergency response vessels" would not be the entire solution but just a part of it...of course not a part of cleaning up this spill but hopefully an option for future spills.

So, part of the inspiration for the idea was the fact that here I am talking to this guy from Koch and they have the membrane already and so I think "I bet there are already people making ships, pumps, and all kinds of gadgets that could be combined to make a more efficient system to fight an oil spill!"...you know, thinking the solution is already there if we could just get all the right people in the room together...maybe I've watched too many movies and I'm too hopeful. I also thought of John Kennedy and the fact that when he was elected president his first goal was to go out and find all of the brightest people in our nation and then ask them to work for his administration. A guy that knew that he would not have all the solutions but he'd have a better chance of finding them if he surrounded himself with brilliant people. Sort of the polar opposite of what we find in Washington these days.

"What's a reasonable pump-and-treat system size? Just as a SWAG, I'll use pumps and membranes for 10,000 gallons per minute (gpm), which is a healthy industrial sized plant. Anything much bigger is going to need a really big boat to carry it."

I truly appreciate that you knuckled down on that and came up with some figures and I had a feeling that there would be somebody here brighter than me that could do that. My feeling is that if the oil industry had an opportunity to harvest obscene amounts of oil from the ocean itself, taking into consideration tides, currents, storms, etc...they'd have already paid a fleet of engineers and scientists lots of money to lock themselves in a bunker and build 3-D maps and graphics showing how the oil would drift and disperse from the source and how they could capture every last drop in a timely fashion.

Pretty much my thought here is why have we not tried to advance the technology of oil spill clean-up in 50 years and I guess the answer would be acceptable losses to the profit margin and well, being lazy...I mean a tanker going down is one thing but a constant flow from a well on the sea floor is something else.

Certainly there are lots of holes in my idea and the first thing you do is try and find those holes and find out if they can be plugged or not. I do hope that there are folks that are a lot brighter than me working on some kind of more efficient system for fighting an oil spill because like Heath says, if you want to keep horses you don't get the horses and then hope they will stand around while you build the barn around them.

I mean thank god when they were dreaming up the space program we didn't have people in charge saying "Well, let's just shoot a couple guys into space and then we'll work out some kind of space craft for them once they are there!"

I think astronauts would have been in short supply...