Gordon Questions Experts on Oil Spill Cleanup

June 9, 2010, WASHINGTON – At a House Science and Technology Committee hearing today in response to the BP oil spill, Congressman Bart Gordon questioned expert witnesses about the state of oil spill cleanup technology.

“We need to tap every resource of knowledge available to us,” Gordon said. “The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an unprecedented tragedy, but oil spills happen in this country and around the world every day. We must push the envelope of research and technology to learn how to better respond to these incidents.”

The response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is the largest operation of its kind in U.S. history.  Despite the scale of the response, current response tools have limited effectiveness in a spill of this magnitude.

Expert witnesses from academia, the private sector, federal agencies and the Coast Guard testified at the hearing to offer insight into how technology could be improved and better applied to spills in the future. As experts acknowledged, oil recovery and clean up techniques have changed little since the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

Gordon questioned experts about barriers between the development and deployment of potentially helpful cleanup technologies. Researchers weighed in on how the technology transfer process could be better coordinated, such as making available controlled on-water testing for new technologies.

Gordon stressed the importance of maintaining focus on how spill cleanup could be better coordinated going forward, noting that drilling continues off U.S. and international shores and the risk of new spills remains.

“The lack of an effective response to this spill highlights the need for a more reliable and standardized cleanup response,” Gordon said. “We need to eliminate the guesswork, and go into spills knowing which tools are most effective in certain conditions.”

The Committee on Science and Technology has jurisdiction over all federal nonmilitary research and development programs, including those at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Gordon, who has chaired the committee since 2007, has made improving technology transfer from lab to market a priority for the committee.