Oil Spill | featured news

The recently recapped oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could remain closed until the relief well is drilled if tests remain favorable, a BP official said Sunday morning.

BP said today its attempt to place a new cap on its ruptured undersea well was proceeding as planned. But while robots replace the old cap, crude is flowing freely.

A culture of politics trumping science, many say, persists despite the president's promises. The use of potentially toxic dispersants to fight the gulf oil spill is cited as just one example.

When he ran for president, Barack Obama attacked the George W. Bush administration for putting political concerns ahead of science on such issues as climate change and public health.

Local officials say the government’s plan to build rock dams to capture oil in the Gulf of Mexico is too risky.

In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day. The disparity between what BP promised in its March 24 filing with federal regulators and the amount of oil recovered since the April 20 explosion underscores what some officials and environmental groups call a misleading numbers game that has led to widespread confusion about the extent of the spill and the progress of the recovery.

As engineers bore deeper into the seafloor toward the source of the oil still spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, BP PLC is growing more confident that the relief well it expects to complete in August will succeed where all previous efforts to contain or kill the gusher have failed.

But what if it doesn't work?

At the very least, oil would continue to spill while workers try something else.

That proposition would surely bring more misery for the people who live, work and play along the shores from Louisiana to Florida.

BP says that it has now spent more than $3 billion in attempts to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and to settle damage claims.

Washington was preparing a revised offshore oil drilling moratorium and cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico returned to normal on Friday after hurricane Alex passed through the region without doing major damage.

BP denied its embattled chief executive was resigning as the first tropical storm to hit the Gulf of Mexico this year threatened to disrupt cleanup work on its massive oil spill, even from a distance.

The first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season was on track on Saturday to reach the Gulf of Mexico within days, a potential threat to containment and cleanup of the worst ever US oil spill.