Day 28: BP Has Some Success Containing Oil Spill

May 17, 2010— -- For nearly four weeks BP's well has been spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, but now the company says one of its schemes to capture that oil is actually working.

Remote submersibles hooked up a mile-long tube to the broken well pipe over the weekend. BP says it is siphoning some of the leaking oil to a tanker on the surface.

"We've got flow going, it is great progress over the last 24 hours. What we are doing is slowing, doing something called opening up the choke at the top of well to slowly increase the flow rates," Bob Dudley, BP's managing director who is overseeing the response efforts, said on "GMA."

"We want to draw down the pressures at the bottom without bringing in the sea water … so we are doing this slowly and over the next day or so we should have a better idea of the flow rate from the well," Dudley said.

This morning BP said the tube was suctioning about 1,000 barrels of oil a day, or about 20 percent of what BP estimates is leaking from the well, according to The Associated Press.

But others are skeptical if this method will work.

"I'm very skeptical that it could collect most of the oil and gas … because the connection … will be leaky under the tremendous pressure that will be present inside the pipe," Steve Wereley, professor of fluid mechanics at Purdue University, said.

BP is pursuing two other methods of stopping the oil and hopes to plug the well in the next week.

"We've got an engineering operation where we will enter the blowout preventer at the well head and be able to inject some heavy fluids to be able to try to permanently stop the flow from the well," Dudley said. "In addition to that we are still drilling the relief well."

Over the weekend Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar sent a letter to BP that stated: "We understand that BP will not in any way seek to rely on the potential $75 million statutory cap to refuse to provide compensation to any individuals or others harmed by the oil spill even if more than $75 million is required and BP will not seek reimbursement from the American taxpayers."