When I saw the recent Saturday Night Live skit poking fun at the idea of a “junk shot” being used to plug up the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I thought it was a far-fetched joke. It turns out that the junk shot is only one of many hastily improvised ideas that has been concocted to try and contain the damage of the continuing oil leak. The Wall Street Journal describes that the junk shot contains, “material such as rubber tires and golf balls [to be] pumped into the shut-off valve, or blowout preventer, that sits atop the well.” While some of the other ideas in the SNL skit are in fact farcical, many of the real methods being used to contain damage from the spill are nearly as bizarre, and reports of their effectiveness vary.

“Booms” are one of the tools being used to combat oil spread. Basically large nets that are meant to scrape up oil from the ocean's surface. Containment efforts have gotten as creative as to try and use alpaca fur in the booms which are largely being reported as ineffective due to the fact that the oil they are intended to contain can only be caught at very slow speeds and from the higher surface levels of the water. One former leader of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill said of the booms,"you can have a thousand boats out there with booms and still not get much of the (oil) back. Unfortunately, as far as a response, I don't know what else can be done."

Other ideas proposed in the clean-up have included “an attempt to place a large dome over the leaking oil well on the ocean floor,” vacuuming up oil when possible, and squeezing a bent tube into the leaking pipe to siphon off extra oil. In the containment effort's defense, the leader of BP's subsea containment Richard Lynch laments, "We usually spend months in concept selection... here you're doing it in the morning and starting fabrication in the afternoon."

While debate about the effectiveness of all of these efforts rages on, the fact remains that the problem has not yet been solved and likely won't be resolved with the single stroke of one genius idea, and the long term effects of the disaster will still have to be dealt with. However, with all of the back and forth brainstorming and resources being invested and spent on clean-up and containment, it begs the question of whether anyone else has any better ideas.

Read More

Gulf oil spill: Progress on leak containment being made, federal officials say, Los Angeles Times

Spill Fight Shows Progress, Wall Street Journal

'SNL' Rips BP, Halliburton For Failed Oil Containment (VIDEO), Huffington Post

Oil-containment effort's success hard to gauge, USA Today

How much does the size of the Gulf oil spill matter?, USA Today