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Reuters - BP Plc said on Sunday its new cap has stopped the oil that has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for three months and hopes to keep it that way until relief wells can permanently seal the leak next month.

The British energy giant, which cut off the flow of oil on Thursday when it began to test the structural integrity of its blown-out Macondo well, expressed growing confidence that the well was intact.

The worst oil spill in U.S. history has caused an economic and environmental disaster in five states along the Gulf Coast and complicated traditionally close ties with Britain.

Those concerns are certain to be on the agenda when British Prime Minister David Cameron meets President Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday.

"Right now there is no target set to open the well back up to flow," Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, told reporters. "We're hopeful that if the encouraging signs continue that we'll be able to continue the integrity test all the way to the point that we get the well killed."

The plan had been to complete the test and then for BP to reattach pipes to the capping equipment and resume siphoning oil to ships on the surface. Now the company hopes to keep the well shut until the relief well is completed in August and the leak is sealed off with heavy drilling mud and cement.

"We will take this day by day," Suttles said. "Clearly we don't want to reanimate flow into the Gulf if we don't have to."

When BP choked off the gusher a mile under the ocean's surface with a new, tighter-fitting containment cap, it was the first time oil has not spewed into the Gulf since an April 20 explosion on an offshore rig killed 11 workers and triggered the disaster.

The government has not yet said what it thinks of BP's new plan to handle the spill.

Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the government's spill response, said on Saturday the pressure test was temporary and meant to clarify options for sealing off the well in the event of a hurricane.

Allen has the final say on when the test will end and on BP's next course of action.

PERMANENT FIX

Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana, said the new cap was good news after a three-month losing battle to try to clean up oil hitting fragile marshlands as more lapped ashore.

"We're very optimistic," Nungesser told the "Fox News Sunday" program. "We see light at the end of the tunnel. It's a very long tunnel but today we're making progress."

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, whose city was hammered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, cautioned that even if the well is capped, issues of cleanup and recovery are far from over.

"It's just a beginning. We have a very, very long way to go," Landrieu said on CNN's "State of the Union" program.

Obama's public approval ratings have slipped as the crisis drags on but some analysts said a capping of the well would help him by removing a symbol of government powerlessness.

The president -- under fire to push BP to plug the leak and clean up a spill that has ravaged multibillion-dollar fishing, tourism and drilling industries and soiled stretches of seashore -- welcomed the success of the new cap but cautioned there was much work to be done on a permanent solution.

The test is monitoring the pressure in the well, which extends 2.5 miles under the seabed, to judge whether it is structurally sound and able to withstand the process to seal the leak.

LOCKERBIE CONTROVERSY

The crisis took on a new twist as the British government said there was no evidence of a connection between BP and last year's release of a Libyan man convicted of the 1988 airline bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people, most of them Americans.

The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled a July 29 hearing on possible ties between BP and the release of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer who was the only person convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

BP has said it lobbied the British government about slow progress in resolving a different prisoner transfer agreement with Libya in 2007 but was not involved in Megrahi's release.

"We were aware that this could have a negative impact on UK commercial interests, including the ratification by the Libyan government of BP's exploration agreement," BP said last week.

The Scottish government denied on Friday it had any contact with BP before it decided to free Megrahi -- a point reiterated by British Foreign Secretary William Hague in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday.

"There is no evidence that corroborates in any way the allegations of BP involvement in the Scottish Executive's decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds in 2009, nor any suggestion that the Scottish Executive decided to release Megrahi in order to facilitate oil deals for BP," Hague said in the letter obtained by Reuters.


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