The Wire

In a dry dock in South Korea, the world’s most expensive off-shore oil rig is about to set sail for Australia. The massive ‘Ocean Great White’ cost $755 million and was purpose built to drill deep into the earth’s crust while floating more than 2 km above the sea floor. While the technology to keep the rig in place has advanced astronomically in the past 40 years, the technology for cleaning up the oil spills that regularly result from these high-risk activities, is still in the dark ages.