Methods that have been tried in the past include the release of South American weevils that eat the plant, as well as machinery that shreds from the water surface.
With companies increasingly putting heavy machinery on the seabed, communications with the surface are essential for deep sea oil production, Harper explains, and Oil States delivers just that.
"The controls we had put in place were inadequate due to the unusually high rainfall, which resulted in surface water flowing onto a track that was being used by heavy machinery to extract timber from the forest, " added Mr Garson.