BP claims Gulf oil spill is contained, but will it hold out?

BP has confirmed that the Gulf oil spilll has now been temporarily contained and will stop crude oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon rig for the first time since April 20th 2010, but will it hold out?

The Gulf disaster caused by BP has now been sealed with a cap, which engineers are now monitoring to see if it holds out.

“The sealing cap system never before has been deployed at these depths or under these conditions, and its efficiency and ability to contain the oil and gas cannot be assured.” said a BP spokeswoman.

“I am very excited that there’s no oil in the Gulf of Mexico,” Kent Wells, a senior vice president for BP, said about the flow during a teleconference on Thursday, “but we just started the test and I don’t want to create a false sense of excitement.”

Oil stopped flowing at 2:25pm local time, Mr. Wells said, when engineers closed the choke line, the final seal of the well.

Mr. Wells, of BP, cautioned that this cap may not be the ultimate solution to sealing the well, and may be only an interim solution. “What we have to be careful about, depending on what this test tells us, we may need to open the well back up and go back to containment options.”

Even if the well does hold, BP acknowledge there will be tar balls washing up on the beaches of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida for months.

Cleansing sensitive Louisiana wetlands of oil could take several more months if not years, and marine biologists have warned that it could be decades before the full impact of the oil, and the dispersants used to break up the slick, is fully understood.

BP’s US shares jumped 10 percent after the company announced that its test had managed to shut off the flow of oil into the ocean.

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