From an interview in today’s Los Angeles Times:

Are there other things you’re learning today that should be applied to drilling? Should the practice resume in deep water?
Drilling will resume in deep water. That’s where the oil is … people all around the world are going farther offshore and farther into deeper waters. So we have to develop methods to recover hydrocarbons, and do it in a much safer way…. It kind of creeps up on you, but this tragedy is a wakeup call.

Well, that’s good news. But this stood out from earlier in the piece:

Looking back over the last two months, is there any engineering that should have been done better?
That’s hard to say. In hindsight, we’re now actively looking at all the designs whenever they’re asking to be manufactured, whether it’s a new cap or “top hat” [containment system], this or that. This has started in the last couple weeks….
Look, we’re not oil people. We’re mostly physicists, a mechanical engineer or two. But on the other hand, there’s a bunch of smart people here, and what we’ve found is that having a bunch of smart people with a different set of eyes actually see things that other people don’t see and actually help improve things.
What about the top kill?
It was known to be a long shot. It was not known how much flow there was…. The only thing that could have been done differently is, it could have been tried earlier. And the reason it could have been tried earlier — and why you’d want to do it earlier rather than later — is that, as I’ve gotten to understand oil wells, at the very beginning of the leak, the oil and the gas rush out.
You’ve just poked a hole into the reservoir. Think of this as shale and sandy type of stuff. As the oil and gas start to come out and you go up the well … it decreases the viscous flow immediately around the well. So in the first days of the flow, one very typically sees less flow, and it continues to build until you’ve eroded away that and built good-flowing channels — turning the reservoir into a pipe.

Sounds like Team Obama wasted a lot of time getting his Energy Secretary up to speed on oil, no? Also, with Chu’s cozy relationship with BP, it’s a valid question to ask if that relationship delayed action on his part.