BP in rush to replace cap on gushing oil well

Oil has been gushing unimpeded since Saturday into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana in the United States, as engineers started a multi-day operation to stop the three-month-old leak in BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

Reuters

Engineers used underwater robots to remove the old cap in order to replace it with a tighter fitting one in the latest attempt by the oil giant to contain the worst environmental disaster in US history.

The whole operation will take some four to seven days, which means there will several days of oil gushing unimpeded into the water.

“There would be a multi-day period there when we're putting the containment cap on where there would be some exposure of hydrocarbons going into the environment,” Thad Allen, who is overseeing the US government’s response to the spill, told media.

An estimated 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil are coming out of the well in every 24-hour period.

The cap and containment system in place was able to take in some 25,000 barrels. BP says the new, tighter-fitting cap and containment ship should raise the capacity to 60,000 to 80,000, which would effectively stop the leak.

But in a statement the company said there was no guarantee the sealing cap would actually work, or be installed in the planned timeframe.

The US Justice Department is still investigating the causes of the spill to determine whether to bring criminal charges, Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday.

"The investigation is ongoing. We are in the process of accumulating documents, talking to witnesses on both the criminal side and the civil side," he told media.