With the failure of its highly touted ‘containment dome’ idea, oil giant BP’s engineers are frantically looking for other solutions to stop the ongoing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by the explosion of the company’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig.

The accident happened on April 20, 2010, and is said to have been caused by a deadly combination of faulty equipment, sub-par safety and maintenance practices, and simple bad luck. Since then, the well has been estimated to be pumping out close to 5,000 barrels (approximately 200,000 gallons) of crude oil a day into the ocean, posing a major threat to the hundreds of species of marine life in the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Everglades, and other areas along the Gulf Coast.

BP has been trying different strategies in order to cap the well, but has not had much success so far. Their first plan was to have remote-controlled submersible robots cap the well, but this proved impossible due to the high volume of the oil leak. The company then attempted to surround the area with a containment boom. However, rough weather caused damage to the boom, allowing the oil to escape.

Their most extreme idea to date is to lower a hastily made dome – or more accurately, an inverted box – over the well site to contain most of the oil. If it had been successful, the four-story-tall, 98,000-pound dome should have been able to contain about 85 percent of the oil leak. The oil inside the box would then have been pumped through a pipe to a waiting drill ship, which would bring it to special treatment facilities.

However, BP engineers did not count on the effects of the formation of ice-like crystals called hydrates inside the dome. These hydrates prevented the dome from creating a water-tight seal against the sea floor, disrupting the flow of the oil that workers were trying to pump onto the drill ship.

The search for ideas to head off what is said to be potentially the greatest oil spill since the Exxon Valdez incident continues. However, what this puts into light is the effect that man’s needs and greed can have on the world around us.

New laws are being drawn up by the Obama administration to severely clamp down on offshore drilling in the US. But will these laws be enough to prevent another Deepwater Horizon-type disaster? Only time will tell.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about the Environment.