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HOUSTON (Dow Jones)--BP Plc (BP, BP.LN) said a large drillship that stopped collecting oil overnight due to a malfunction resumed operations early Saturday. The Discoverer Enterprise, a drillship that collects oil and flares natural gas from a mile-deep well in the Gulf of Mexico through a long pipe, stopped operating Friday after a flame arrestor -- a device engineer to stop a flame -- malfunctioned, diminishing the rate of oil the company recovered. The ship's work restarted at 6.30 a.m. CDT and "has been building up to stable rates since," BP said in a press release Saturday afternoon. A second, smaller collecting vessel, the Q4000, continued collecting throughout the interruption, BP said. BP said that about 24,500 barrels of oil were captured Friday. Some 14,400 barrels were collected, and 10,100 barrels were flared. In addition, the company flared about 47.4 million barrels of natural gas. The technical hiccup came a day after BP captured a record amount of oil--more than 25,000 barrels of oil Thursday--after bringing in the Q4000. The company was expecting to ramp up its recovery rate to more than 50,000 barrels a day by the end of the month and to as much as 80,000 by mid-July by bringing in additional equipment. The interruption underscores the complexity -- and fragility -- of the oil-collecting operation, which mitigates some of the effect of the spill, currently estimated at between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels per day. BP is under intense pressure to contain a spill that continues to grow nearly two months after its leased rig, the Deepwater Horizon, exploded and sank some 50 miles from the Louisiana shore, killing 11 and generating the worst environmental disaster the area has seen. Even as collection efforts at the surface intensify, BP is moving forward with a parallel strategy to permanently shut down the leaking well by intersecting it with another well and flooding it with cement. Currently that relief well is moving ahead of schedule, but the drilling operation will have to slow down in coming days as it enters a critical phase, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said in a conference call Friday. - By Angel Gonzalez, Dow Jones Newswires;713-547-9214;angel.gonzalez@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires June 19, 2010 13:52 ET (17:52 GMT)