BATON ROUGE, La. — A four-story containment dome is on its way to the site of the leaking oil well and when the structure is installed on Monday, BP officials hope the experimental procedure will help stem the flow of crude oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico since an explosion rocked a drilling rig there 15 days ago.
For the first time in several days, due to light winds, crews were able to conduct a controlled burn in two of the most concentrated areas of oil. This effort came as officials started the day with some encouraging, albeit small news: engineers had succeeded in shutting off one of the three leaks from the damaged well late Tuesday night, BP said.
Though by itself the move will not reduce the amount of oil being released — estimated at 210,000 gallons a day — “it is from two locations now,” Doug Suttles, the chief operating officer of BP said at a news conference Wednesday afternoon in Robert, La.
Submersible robots, controlled remotely from a ship on the surface, were able to place a specially designed valve over the end of a leaking drill pipe lying on the sea floor in water about 5,000 feet deep, and stop oil from escaping at that point.
With one valve shut, BP turned its attention to capping the worst of the remaining leaks, but cautioned that it was hard to determine whether the containment dome would be effective.
“This hasn’t been done before, it’s very complex and it will very likely have challenges along the way,” Mr. Suttles said.
The structure, 98 tons, was loaded onto the barge that departed at noon for what is to be a 12-hour trip to the site.
The plan is to lower the dome to the sea floor and place it over the leak, capturing the gushing oil and funneling it up to a rig waiting at the surface. Because the other leak is too far away to fit inside the same dome, crews are building a second containment dome, which could be implemented if the first dome is successful, a BP spokesman. John Curry said.
Weather conditions allowed recovery crews to move forward on several fronts to control the spread of the oil slick.
Skimming boats were out in other areas to corral the thick oil from the surface of the water. Aircraft dropped dispersants onto the oil from overhead.
The Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry said officials could not accurately measure the size of the oil spill because it was constantly changing. “It’s a pretty wide swath of coverage with a rainbow sheen at the leading edge,” she said at the news conference.
“The leading edge is very close to the Chandeleur Islands, but the heavy concentrations are farther offshore,” she added.
The report of progress in containing the leak came as BP, which is responsible for cleaning up the vast oil spill resulting from the fatal explosion and fire that destroyed the rig it was leasing, acknowledged that the flow of oil could become vastly larger than initially estimated.
In a closed-door briefing for members of Congress, a senior BP executive conceded Tuesday that the ruptured oil well could conceivably spill as much as 60,000 barrels a day of oil, more than 10 times the estimate of the current flow. A barrel of crude oil contains roughly 42 gallons.
“The rate could go up to that,” Mr. Suttles of BP said, when asked to verify a report in The Times. “It’s not the situation we have at this moment, but it’s not impossible.”
The scope of the problem has grown drastically since the rig, the Deepwater Horizon, sank into the gulf. Now, the discussion with BP on Capitol Hill is certain to intensify pressure on the company, which is facing a crisis similar to what the Toyota Motor Company had with uncontrolled acceleration — despite its efforts to control the damage to its reputation as a corporate citizen, the problem may be worsening.
Amid growing uncertainty about the extent of the leak, and when it might be stanched, pressure on BP intensified on multiple fronts, from increasingly frustrated residents of the Gulf Coast to federal, state and local officials demanding more from the company.
Mississippi’s Attorney General, Jim Hood, along with attorneys general from the other Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Alabama, Texas and Florida, sent a letter to BP officials on Wednesday asking them to clarify how they would pay for the cleanup of the spill.
BP has dispatched executives to hold town meetings in the affected region, and it has turned to lower-profile social media outlets to trumpet its cleanup efforts and moves to organize volunteers.
The Senate energy committee has summoned executives from BP and Transocean Ltd., the rig operator, as well as a number of oil industry technical experts to a hearing next week. The next day, the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing, to which top executives of BP, Transocean and Halliburton have been asked to appear, a committee spokeswoman said.
The White House released on Wednesday morning a detailed timeline of the federal government’s response to the oil spill on its Web site, even as President Obama’s administration has come under fire for not responding quick enough to the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.
“We have compiled this chronology in the spirit of transparency so the American people can have a clear understanding of what their government has been and is doing to respond to the massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster,” Heidi Avery, White House Deputy Homeland Security Advisor wrote on the site.
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