The cap has been lowered in hope of stopping the oil flow. The British Petroleum engineers have installed a cap on the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico but failed to stop and capture all the gushing crude.
BP robots successfully placed a funnel-like device on the damaged riser wipe after slicing it off nearly a mile (1.6 km) below the surface late Thursday, AFP reported.
The device, however, is not capable of capturing all the gushing oil as the crude was still pouring from the cap, a live video feed showed.
Despite failing to stop the leak for 45 consecutive days, the London-based oil giant remained optimistic about its operation, saying the device could trap the "vast majority" of the spewing oil.
"I'm pretty confident this is going to work," BP chief operating officer Doug Suttles said on ABC's Good Morning America on Friday.
"It probably won't capture all of the flow. But it should capture the vast majority."
The tactic applied by BP is the latest in a series of desperate attempts to contain the worst oil spill in US history.
"Even if successful, this is only a temporary and partial fix and we must continue our aggressive response operations at the source, on the surface and along the Gulf's precious coastline," said US Coast Guard chief Admiral Thad Allen, the official in charge of the government response to the spill.
Amid public anger about the government response to the catastrophe, US President Barack Obama has reportedly postponed his trip to Australia and Indonesia, heading toward the Gulf instead to show the oil disaster is top on his crowded agenda.
"I would love to just spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people, but that is not what I was hired to do -- my job is to solve this problem," Obama told CNN Thursday, adding he was "furious at this entire situation."
The administration recently sent BP a 69-million-dollar 'preliminary' bill for the recovery operations relating to the oil spill, which was caused by an explosion on April 20. The explosion left 11 workers killed.
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