Hopes rise as BP aims to keep well sealed

BP raised hopes yesterday of an end to the oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, saying it intends to keep the well sealed until a permanent "kill" operation can begin in two weeks' time.

Exhaustive tests were ongoing to check that the runaway well was secure, but officials said the valves on the cap would remain shut as long as pressure readings remain high and no new leaks were discovered on the seabed.

"Clearly we don't want to reinitiate flow into the Gulf if we don't have to," said BP's chief operating officer Doug Suttles.

"We're hopeful that if the encouraging signs continue we'll be able to continue the integrity test all the way to the point where we get the well killed."

The start of that two-week operation to plug the well permanently by pumping in heavy drilling fluids and then cement is now only weeks away as engineers have only 30 metres left vertically to drill.

"The earliest we would intercept the original well bore and start the kill operation still looks like towards the last few days of the month of July," said Mr Suttles.

High pressure readings from high-tech devices fitted on BP's latest containment cap have so far indicated no leak in the well bore, which stretches down four kilometres below the seabed.

Seismic and sonar surveys and video footage filmed by a dozen robotic submarines in the murky depths of the Gulf have also found no evidence of any oil or gas leaking through the rock formations on the sea floor.

News that the gusher may finally be capped once and for all will come as relief to wary Gulf residents who have seen the relentless flow of toxic crude cripple their economy and tarnish their shorelines.

The newspaper headlines, printed before Mr Suttles explained the cap would stay on, betrayed the skepticism of many in the region after a string of botched BP operations that raised hopes only to dash them later.

"Gusher plugged, but for how long?" asked The Star in Louisiana, posing a question echoed almost word-for-word by the The Anniston Star in Alabama.

Conscious of the underlying anger and bitterness, Mr Suttles was quick to stress that this was only the beginning of the end as far as BP was concerned and that the British oil giant would stick it out for the "long-term".

"There's a lot to do even once we get this well completely sealed off. We have to complete the clean-up and mitigate the impacts to both the environment and the people of the region," he said.

Oil has washed up on the coasts of all five Gulf states - Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida - since the Deepwater Horizon rig sank on April 22, two days after an explosion that killed 11 workers.

The spill's total size could be above four million barrels (170 million gallons), making it the biggest accidental oil disaster of all time. Iraqi forces released far more during the 1991 Gulf War.

It has killed birds, closed fishing grounds, decimated the tourism industry and done untold environmental damage, including to marshland nature reserves that could take decades to recover.

There has been political fallout too for US President Barack Obama as he struggled to convince Americans of his strong leadership in the face of a disaster that was largely out of his control.

Mr Obama said on Saturday that the halt to the oil flow was "good news", but cautioned: "It is important that we don't get ahead of ourselves."