[ian807]

So, is the oil floating about in and on the water now a kind of salvage?

Can entrepreneurs like former shrimp boat captains, for example, start gathering it up and selling it by the barrel at spot prices? Perhaps to competitors of BP? (Insert satisfyingly evil grin here).

[steam_cannon]

No and here are several reasons.

First oil on the surface has evaporated such that it's mostly tarry waxy nastier molecules. So it's low quality oil and thus low value.

Second it's a salad dressing mix of oil and sea water. Say you rig up collectors to pull in the oil on the surface. The surface oil is thinner then paper, at the edges of the slick it is as thin as one molecule thick. Most of the oil is deep in the water in dilute droplet clouds under the surface. So the problem with skimming up oil above or below the water is that it's incredibly thin and you'd pull in lots of sea water too. And then to separate the two you need centrifuges or storage / separation tanks. It can be done and is being done to a limited extent, but it's not a money maker. Even if the oil on the surface was paper thick everywhere, that's going to require a lot of pumping and separation to add up to much profit off of waxy oily tar.

Another problem is that the oils may be slow or difficult to separate out of the water. The dispersant used makes the oil form droplets that help make the oil easier for bacteria to degrade it. But these small droplets also make the oil into an underwater mist that hangs in the water. So while there are slicks on the surface, there are also mile wide clouds below of water with droplets of oil that we know isn't rapidly separating from the sea water. Separating the oil from the water is actually harder then it sounds.

And another problem, as the oil evaporates it's fumes are toxic even if the oil is thin and flammable if the oil is thick. So the work would be hazardous too.

Summarizing: The oil is spread out, degraded, hazardous and just not an economically viable resource as it is.

It's like how tarballs washed up on beaches aren't an economically viable source of road tar, the oil on the surface would not be economically profitable to salvage. It would be good to get the oil out of the water as much as possible, but the dilution and scale of this disaster is beyond what we can handle and definitely not something we can profit from.