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BURAS, La.—BP PLC has started to lower the cofferdam containment dome that it hopes will capture oil leaking from a well at the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico and prevent it reaching the surface, a spokesman for the company said Friday. It will take some time for the device to reach the bottom and be connected to a vessel on the surface that will store the leaking oil, but BP hopes to have it up and running by Monday, he said. "It has never been done before at these depths," he added. BP technicians are also investigating the possibility...

WASHINGTON, May 5 (UPI) -- BP said Wednesday it had capped one of three leaks from its damaged Gulf of Mexico well and it might be able to seal the well in as little as two weeks. BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward told the Houston Chronicle the company was considering an untested approach he called "top kill," which involves reconfiguring equipment to pump heavy fluids into the well to stop the flow and create a permanent seal. The method involves using the blowout preventer that failed when an explosion crippled the Deepwater Horizon well, triggering a fire that has...

ENERGY giant BP says it will pay "all necessary and appropriate clean-up costs'' from the US oil pollution disaster. "BP takes responsibility for responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We will clean it up,'' a company statement said. The news comes after Barack Obama said BP was clearly responsible for the spill and must pay to clean it up. Oil from beneath a rig which exploded and overturned in the Gulf of Mexico has formed a huge slick now coming ashore on the US Gulf coast. The cost has been estimated at several billion dollars.

Bad weather is hampering clean-up efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, where emergency crews are struggling to cap an undersea oil leak. U.S. officials are pressing British Petroleum to do more to respond to the disaster. Strong winds and high tides are complicating the work of emergency crews that have fanned out across the Gulf of Mexico in response to the oil spill. U.S. officials say the leak is dumping 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the gulf, feeding a massive slick on the surface of the water. Emergency crews are using a number of methods to stop the...

Emergency crews in the Gulf of Mexico are deploying containment booms along the U.S. coastline as a massive oil slick from a damaged deepwater well approaches land. Experts say the slick might reach Mississippi River delta portions of the state of Louisiana by late Thursday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, says the sandy shores of the Louisiana delta lie directly in the path of the expanding oil slick as it moves west. Meteorologists say winds have been constant for several days, pushing the slick from the site of the damaged Horizon Deepwater oil rig. The rig exploded...