BP PLC officials said they were considering several options to stop the daily rush of at least 757,000 liters of crude from a blown-out well two kilometers underwater. BP PLC spokesman Mark Proegler said no one has settled on what step the company will take next.
Engineers at BP PLC were wrestling with a shopping list of ways to plug the well or siphon off the spewing crude, including a smaller containment box, dubbed a top hat, and injecting debris including shredded rubber into the well as a stopper, called a junk shot.
“There’s a lot of techniques available to us. The challenge with all of them is, as you said, they haven’t been done in 5,000 feet of water,” BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told NBC television Monday.
The engineers appear to be “trying anything people can think of” to stop the leak, said Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor of environmental studies.
On land, helicopters were expected to drop sandbags along a six-kilometer stretch of coastline in Louisiana to guard against thick blobs of crude that began washing up on beaches.
BP said Monday that the oil spill has cost the company $350 million so far. The tally included the cost of the immediate response, containment, relief well drilling, commitments to the Gulf Coast states, and settlements and federal costs.
The company did not speculate on the final bill, which most analysts expect to run into tens of billions of dollars.
With crippled equipment littering the ocean floor, engineers from the oil company — which is responsible for the cleanup — scrambled to devise a fresh method to cap the ruptured well.
