CORRECT: Efforts To Prepare Relief Well To Kill Gulf Spill Continued Sat

(A report "Efforts To Prepare Relief Well To Kill Gulf Spill Continued Sat" published at 10:05 p.m. EDT misstated in the sixth paragraph the amount of coastline affected by the Gulf oil spill. A corrected version follows.) NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Work continued Saturday to prepare a relief well to pump mud and cement into BP PLC (BP, BP.LN)'s Macondo oil well, which has released millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico since April, according to an update Saturday evening by the Deepwater Horizon Joint Information Center. On Friday, BP said that an attempt at a "static kill" would be delayed by a day or so to late Monday or Tuesday because rock debris found at the bottom of the relief well needed to be cleaned up. The relief well, drilled to a depth of 17,864 feet below the Gulf's surface, is currently being prepared by a drilling rig before the diagnostic testing can be conducted to determine the well's integrity and the probability of the relief well's success. Another vessel has completed pressure testing and is ready to conduct the diagnostics test, which will include pumping mud and cement in through the top of the well. As of Friday, BP said that the well has a capacity of 2,000 barrels, but six-times that amount of drilling fluid is sitting aboard vessels around the site where the Deepwater Horizon rig operated before it exploded and sank in late April. A second relief well was drilled to a depth of 15,963 feet as a redundancy measure. So far, 34.7 million gallons of oil-water mix have been recovered and controlled burns have removed 11.14 million gallons off the surface of the water. Oil has affected 623 miles of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida shoreline. -By Naureen S. Malik, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-4210; naureen.malik@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires August 01, 2010 00:15 ET (04:15 GMT)