No insurance company can write a policy large enough to cover a disaster on the scale of the Gulf mess and it'd doubtful any company would write one if they could. The best you could get would be a policy with a hard cap on the payout, maybe in the billion dollar range at best. At a guess, the premium would be on the order of 10%.

The idea of a rainy-day tax paid by all offshore outfits is more workable but it has problems too, number one being the size needed. How big a fund do we need. 100 billion dollars? 200 billion? Huge premiums would be needed again and the it wouldn't be funded properly for years, assuming no more accidents in the meantime.

I like the idea towards the bottom of the Steiner piece (which is excellent, by the way):"...the government should require that exploratory drilling in extreme or sensitive environments also include a companion emergency relief well be drilled along side..."

Besides requiring an automatic relief well, require third-party inspection of all drilling efforts so that someone outside the oil complex is looking at equipment requirements and condition.

All this would at least double the cost of finding and producing deep-water petroleum but it seems necessary, at the least.