PEOPLE VIEW OIL spills with horror, especially when gooey oil comes ashore and fouls pristine beaches or runs into streams and decimates entire fish populations. The public wants something done immediately, and it usually demands that the mess be cleaned up and the environment restored.

Cleaning up after a large oil spill is never simple or easy, and frequently, it's not immediate. Even the best efforts often can't entirely fix the problem—the scope of most oil spills is just too large. Sometimes, the remedies employed to clean up a spill actually make the problem worse.

Because oil is essentially liquid, it travels like liquid—it can go almost anywhere. When oil is spilled in water, it can travel even more extensively because it can go wherever the water goes. Regardless of where a spill occurs, the oil...