Ridiculous.

Especially in a crisis like the Gulf is experiencing now, the regulation should be that you just have to take out more oil than you put in. If you don’t get it all in the first pass, make another pass; if the ship you can deploy quickly releases more back into the ocean than a ship you can’t deploy for months, then deploy the first ship quickly and deploy the other ship later.

Instead, nobody does anything because it’s virtually impossible to meet such a ridiculous standard.