BP: Cap should start choking oil ‘soon’ after fix

After fixing a leak on a cap designed to plug up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, BP engineers readied today to see if the new top is enough to contain the gusher. Kent Wells, a BP vice president, says the leak, which was discovered late Wednesday, was fixed by replacing the pipe called a “choke line” on the side of the capping device. The work set back the testing process on the cap’s capabilities. The test will involve closing off to the gulf all three openings in the cap, in theory stopping the oil leaking into the water. BP will be monitoring pressure under the cap. High pressure is good, because it shows there’s only a single leak. Low pressure, below 6,000 pounds per square inch or so, could mean more leaks farther down in the well. BP expects to keep the oil trapped in the cap for 48 hours before it decides if the approach is working. The cap—a 75-ton metal stack of lines and valves—was lowered onto the well Monday in hopes of either bottling up the oil inside the well machinery, or capturing it and funneling it to the surface. Now that the new choke line is in place, BP has to start from a few steps back to resume the process of testing the cap’s ability to shut off the flow of oil into gulf waters. “We’re going to keep moving forward with this,” Wells says.