Quotes of the Day

In mid-May, Mark Miller set up shop in a vacant Kia auto dealership in Pascagoula, Miss. — an oceanfront city near the middle of the U.S. Gulf Coast. Unlike the previous tenant, though, he's not selling cars. He's in town to cash in on what has recently become — and will probably be for a while — the area's biggest industry: oil-spill cleanup. Miller has been in the environmental-remediation business for 39 years, and 2010 will likely be his best. "It's a huge event," he says of the Deepwater Horizon spill. "I'm very happy with the work I have."

Miller Environmental Group, based in New York, has hired nearly 1,500 workers in the past month. The company has a fleet of vessels that suck up oil in shallow waters. It has crews in Florida and Mississippi cleaning up beaches and marshes. Other teams specialize in processing oil from boats that return from working the slick, so that they don't contaminate water around the docks or upstream. And like everyone else working the spill, Miller's company has laid boom — miles and miles of the floating orange lines that are supposed to contain oil once it rises to the surface.

The oil spill that has been contaminating the Gulf of Mexico for more than two months is a nearly unequaled environmental catastrophe. And for a region that counts on fishing, tourism and, yes, oil to sustain it, the spill is an economic calamity as well. But disaster is also a business opportunity, and companies like Miller's are cleaning up by cleaning up. Exxon spent $4.3 billion in cleanup and legal costs after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, the most expensive ever at the time. The Gulf disaster will easily eclipse that. Wall Street analysts have estimated that BP will spend $14 billion to $23 billion on the cleanup alone. BP has already put aside $20 billion in an escrow account to cover future damage claims.

It adds up to a windfall for the dozens of companies that can provide ships, crews, equipment and expertise. Clean Harbors of Norwell, Mass., one of Miller's larger competitors, is expected to generate $300 million in sales from the Gulf spill in the next year alone. Waste Management of Houston, a large, publicly traded disposal company, has been hired by BP to cart away and landfill contaminated sand and other oily waste. The chemical company Nalco of Naperville, Ill., estimates it will sell $40 million worth of the dispersant Corexit, which BP has used heavily to break up oil in the water — up from about $2 million in typical annual sales.

BP alone doesn't decide where the money goes. Each day, the company works with consultants to form an action plan subject to approval by the Coast Guard and state officials. An estimated 45,000 people are now working on the Gulf cleanup.

The company set to get the biggest piece of that pie is a little-known firm set up in part by BP. In 1990, after the 11 million — gal. (42 million L) Exxon Valdez disaster, the federal government put in place regulations mandating that all oil and oil-shipping companies have spill-response plans and teams of workers on staff or on retainer ready to clean a spill. Instead of staffing up or hiring other firms to do the work, the giant oil companies formed their own response unit, Marine Spill Response Corp. (MSRC), to satisfy the new regulations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 20 years later, the nonprofit MSRC has become the largest company in the oil-cleanup business. Its closest competition, National Response Corp. (NRC), typically focuses on tanker spills, though NRC too has been retained by BP.

In the Gulf, MSRC has 10 large skimmer-equipped boats, with two more on the way, each 210 ft. (64 m) long and capable of siphoning up to 4,000 gal. (15,000 L) of oil off the water's surface. The company also has two oil barges in the region to store the collected oil, an airplane to drop dispersant on the slick and a fleet of smaller vessels to deploy boom or move workers. It has 250 full-time employees in the Gulf and has had as many as 7,000 workers on contract at times during the past two months. Despite its relative size in the remediation business, MSRC doesn't typically make a lot of money, because big spills are rare. In an ordinary year, MSRC has about $90 million in revenue. Most of it comes from annual dues the oil companies pay, enough to keep MSRC and its fleet ready to respond. BP's portion, for instance, was about $11 million last year. That's just the retainer. When a spill happens, oil companies have to pay up. The large skimmers alone cost as much as $40,000 per day to operate. With 10 skimmers active for much of the past two months, BP is already looking at a bill of at least $24 million from MSRC — nearly as much as MSRC booked in services with all the oil companies in 2007 and '08 combined. BP won't benefit directly from the banner year it has created for MSRC, but a portion of what it pays the company will be credited against future annual dues.

In addition to operating boats, MSRC acts as the oil industry's general contractor, doling out work to subcontractors as needed. MSRC's CEO, Steve Benz, says that with most spills, his company can handle 80% of the work. But the magnitude of the Gulf disaster has flipped that equation. "Billions and billions of dollars of work will be going to our subcontractors," says Benz, who joined MSRC from BP in 1996. "It's going to be a very good year for them."

One of MSRC's largest subcontractors is Clean Harbors. The company has 2,000 people on its payroll around the Gulf, cleaning beaches and marshland. Scott Metzger, who is heading up Clean Harbors' efforts in the Gulf, has spent nearly every day since the end of April in the region, only occasionally heading home to Plymouth, Mass., to "recharge."

Metzger says his company typically responds to about 2,500 incidents a year. Some jobs are as small as handling what comes out of a transformer on a utility pole when it overheats, about 11 gal. (42 L). The Gulf spill — the latest estimate puts it at 74 million to 145 million gal. (280 million to 549 million L) — is the largest Metzger has ever seen. "Each of these unique environments requires different techniques," he says. "You have to be careful not to cause more damage than if you just left the oil where it was."

Even companies far north of the Gulf region are benefiting. Before the spill, Elastec/American Marine, based in Carmi, Ill., had the largest inventory of oil boom in the country — 44,350 ft. (13,500 m). It sold out. The company is rapidly manufacturing more and now has orders for an additional 300,000 ft. (91,000 m). Besides boom, Elastec, founded in 1990, makes handheld skimmers that lift oil out of the ocean and separate it from water. The company's specialty is a drum-shaped skimmer, which Elastec executives say captures more oil and less seawater than other devices. The skimmers, along with air tanks to make them work and storage containers for the oil, can cost as much as $50,000 each. Orders are pouring in. "We have our factory working two 10-hour shifts a day, six days a week," says Jeff Bohleber, Elastec's chief financial officer. "We are already set to double our typical annual revenue, and we will probably exceed that. It's the best year we've ever had."

Miller, despite having spent his life in the environmental-cleanup industry, has long been a skeptic of the business. You spend a lot of time waiting around for work, he says. But the BP spill may change all that. Clearly, there is a need to be more prepared for oil spills, especially big ones. The Exxon Valdez spill led to regulations that benefited the spill-response industry. This disaster is likely to as well. "There are going to be opportunities for expansion and more research and development," says Miller. "This event is going to have a substantial impact on the industry." That means the dollars for Miller and others will continue to flow long after this oil has been mopped up. It's what you might call a spillover effect.

• Stephen Gandel