Certainly. It's a very good question. I'm happy to try to deal with that.
When I refer to containment, I'm talking about containment efforts that are put in place after an incident has happened, so after there's some sort of failure of equipment and procedures like we saw in Macondo. You will recall--we'll all recall--that several things happened simultaneously in the aftermath of the Macondo incident. The first thing was that there were two relief wells spudded in the immediately adjacent area to make sure that one of them would succeed. Everybody knew that was going to take a number of months, and it did take quite a number of months.
There were also, simultaneously, a number of activities focused on trying to contain the oil at the wellhead, where the oil was coming out of the blowout preventer. The first one involved a large structure. Because of the presence of gas coming from the well at the well border, hydrates formed and caused freezing, so that actually caused that big container they had lowered over the well to lift off it.
There were a number of other efforts made to put devices on top of the well to contain the oil. Eventually, that was what happened. They put a device on the top of the head that caused the spill to cease.
To get there, though, they were kind of starting from scratch. There had really been no organized plan of activity aimed at containment of that nature for that kind of spill. What has happened since then, of course, is that BP itself has learned a lot of lessons, and it had folks from other operators helping as it was doing that.
You'll note I refer to something called the Marine Well Containment Company, which is a corporate body formed initially by the four oil companies--Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips--which have since been joined by BP. They've committed over $1 billion to develop and have in place containment equipment similar to what was used on Macondo but that could be deployed almost instantaneously or within a matter of days and not weeks or months.