BP (British Petroleum) announced a new plan Tuesday hoping to permanently seal its blown-out Gulf of Mexico oil well, with the disaster expected to be the top issue at a White House summit between President Barack Obama and new British Prime Minister David Cameron. The US government allowed BP to keep in place a cap limiting the flow from the ruptured wellhead for another 24 hours, as engineers proposed a new plan to choke the well with a massive injection of cement and mud. BP said the aim would be to send down heavy drilling mud through the blowout preventer valve system that sits on top of the well and then inject cement into the wellhead to seal it. "We're still very much in the design and planning phase," said BP vice president for exploration and production Kent Wells. "We've got some real experienced teams working on this over the next couple of days." The latest plan is similar to the "top-kill" effort in late May, weeks after the April explosion of a BP-leased rig triggered the environmental catastrophe, when engineers spent days pumping drilling fluid into the gushing well. The effort failed to reduce the flow of crude, but officials believe the outcome could be different this time because the flow already is mostly contained. US Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who is overseeing the disaster response, said the planning was still in initial stages, and he emphasized that two relief wells being drilled close to the blown-out wellhead remain the ultimate long-term solution. BP's Wells said Allen would decide whether to proceed with the new so-called "static kill" in the coming days.
