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Kevin, how long have you been working on this machine, exactly? >> well, i've -- i took a technology at a department of energy probably in '92 or '93 and it was a very small, little machine and extrapolated that idea into r&d for about three years and enormous amount of money thinking we didn't have to fight oil spills the way we had been seeing the recuring images and basically i thought that we could do this. and we scaled that up into something incredibly efficient and robust to the point where we could separate 200 gallons a minute. and, you know, at the purity of 99.9% oil and 99.9 water....

The ensuing disaster in the gulf. oh, and since then, oh, there's more, just this weekend crude oil pipeline burst in salt lake ci city. so, again, though, it's only because there haven't been any spills that the oil industry hasn't bothered to come up with any new cleanup technology. if only there had been some spills, say, in the last 40 years. >> i think that probably part of the reason is there have been so few big spills. >> see, now, though, they're paying attention to this spill. this time it's going to be different. this spill will surely be enough to get the oil industry to update the...

Gulf. since then, there's more. just this weekend crude oil pipeline burst in salt lake city. so, again, it's only because there haven't been any spills that the oil industry hasn't bothered to come up with new cleanup technology. if only there had been some spills, say, in the last 40 years. >> i think that probably part of the reason is there have been so few big spills. >> see, now, though, they're paying attention to this spill. this spill will surely be enough to get the oil industry to clean up the industry technology since the 18960s. they didn't notice those spills. this time it will b...

Point. >> costner himself raised the issue in the hearing. is he just out hocking a product? he says he doesn't know. you can take his or someone else's. no one has really invested the resources to develop this type of product, including oil companies. these oil companies have made billions of dollars in profit over the years but as a group since 2000 have spent very little reaching this kind of cleanup technology. wolf? >> lisa sylvester reporting. thank you very much. florida is now feeling the impact perform governor charlie crist is here on the update of the spreading crisis. also, my inte...

Deeper and deeper and oil companies have gotten more and more and more profitable to the point where you can't write fairy tales about it without sounding like you're crazy, how much improvement has there been in the technology for when thing goes wrong? >> most of the investment in terms of intellectual capacity and research was made around 1979 through the late ' 80s. very little work has been done, very little research dollars have been invested in response efforts, even understanding remediation technologies. how do you go about understanding what's available in the natural communities, wh...