BP Share News (BP.)

(Updates with more details from BP) By Susan Daker Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES HOUSTON (Dow Jones)--BP PLC (BP, BP.LN) hit only one small snag overnight and remains "pleased with its progress" in the second day of its new effort to contain oil gushing from its broken well in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, a BP vice president said Sunday morning. BP is working to install a new, tight-fitting containment cap on the broken, mile-deep well. On Saturday, spill responders with the help of undersea robots ripped off the first cap, which temporarily increased the oil flowing from the well head. On Sunday, BP plans to install a transition spool, a piece of equipment that will allow the U.K. oil giant to eventually put the new cap on top of the well, BP Vice President Kent Wells said during a morning teleconference. The entire process should take about another three to six days. "We're in day two, so we should anticipate that this should take another three to five, six days," Wells said during an afternoon teleconference call. "But if everything goes extremely well, then we'll be on the shorter end of that (range)." Meanwhile, the company continues to work to bring another containment vessel, the Helix Producer, up to full speed. However, overnight during an inspection, workers found and are fixing an issue with the ship, the only blip the company reported experiencing since it started the new process at noon Saturday. By Sunday evening, BP expects that the Helix Producer will begin collecting oil for the first time since it arrived near the well nearly two weeks ago, Wells said. The company plans to announce the start-up of the Helix Producer on Monday morning, he said. Even though there is no cap on the well, BP is still siphoning oil via a separate system and flaring it off from a ship, the Q4000, which sits on the surface near the well, located off the coast of Louisiana. BP has been working to contain the well's leaking for more than 12 weeks after Transocean Ltd.'s (RIG) Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, unleashing the spill that has fouled the coasts of at least four states and killed sea creatures and birds. For the past several weeks, the more-loosely-fitting cap and the Q4000 system have managed to keep up to about 25,000 barrels of oil a day out of the Gulf. The new sealing cap-system, plus additional measures, will allow the recovery of 60,000 barrels to 80,000 barrels a day in two to three weeks, Wells has said. Federal and independent scientists have estimated that between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels of oil have flowed into the Gulf from the broken well each day. On Saturday, BP recovered about 15,200 barrels of oil. About 7,096 barrels of oil were collected by the Discoverer Enterprise. The number is a decrease of previous day's rates because the Discoverer Enterprise was disconnected in order to remove the cap. BP also flared about 8,100 barrels of oil from aboard the Q4000. The ship also flared 35.2 million cubic feet of natural gas. -By Susan Daker, Dow Jones Newswires; 713-547-9208; susan.daker@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires July 11, 2010 15:55 ET (19:55 GMT)