and working. the hope is that will finally put an end to this 84-day-old crisis. we re joined by national incident commander admiral thad allen. thanks so much for being with us this morning. good morning, kiran. the idea is to get an all-encompassing seal, a tighter seal on this leak and then draw up as we were hearing from bp officials, perhaps all of the oil. explain this operation and how it is going so far. well, we re going to be in a position later on today to put a containment cap over the well. this containment cap will have the ability to actually close down valves and slowly contain all the oil. once we do that we ll know how much pressure is actually in the well. that could lead to one of two positive outcomes. it could tell us the well is withholding the pressure and we can actually shut the well in or just cap it, if you will. if there is a need that we could produce oil and have enough platforms up on the surface
couple of years to get all this rubble removed. so it is not going to happen overnight. well, i know you guys are working tirelessly. julie and cat, thanks so much for joining us this morning. tonight on cnn, larry king live, a special. he looks at rebuilding efforts six months after the quake. that s tonight, 9:00 eastern right here on cnn. also coming up in just about two hours, anderson cooper is back in haiti. he covered the story extensively when the quake firsthand. ael join us live with more about what he s seeing right now. this morning s top stories just minutes away, including an ugly end to a tournament celebrating the beautiful game. there have been three bombings killing at least 64 people as they watched the world cup final in uganda. a live report from there coming up. plus, day 84 of this oil spill. bp drilling two relief wells to recap its broken well as crude keeps gushing. it could be the final option there to stop the leak. at 7:15 eastern, national inci
the period of time, this week mean that they re able to stop the oil using this, possibly. bp says the work, though, to install this new cap is ahead of schedule. that s good news. it could be in place sometime today if everything comes to pass. oil has been gushing freely over the last 48 hours as they remove that old containment cap and put in this onew one. once the smaller, tight-fitting cap is in place, it could contain most if not all of the oil that is spewing out of the broken wellhead. some of the animations here showing what they are going through at this moment as well as the coming day. this is all welcome news. if this were to come to pass, moving that new cap on, that s what we re watching for, because there s 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day spewing out. with this on, it could mitigate that. but even if it works, it s not a final fix. let s go to thad allen, the top government man on this.
you ve been talking about, we re watching that. essentially as admiral allen says, they believe they could go either that containment cap moves into place and presuming that everything continues to work according to plan, that that would either cap off and there would be no more oil flow, probably at least 48 hours away from knowing whether or not that indeed will be the case. or if it does continue to work and some flow continues to come out, that they would move these vessels into place on the surface of the water that would help collect that. we ll see if that works. of course, there could be other setbacks as you well know. we ve seen almost over the last three months a series of setbacks, some of these ideas have worked better than others. it s very cautiously optimistic. bp officials pleased with the way things are moving. one of the other things we re looking at in new orleans is the national commission established by president obama to investigate the cause of this
this period of time where the oil, as has been described, is just gushing out unabated. do we have any accurate assessment of just how much we are talking about in terms of barrels or gallons going into the ocean as you wait for this containment cap operation to be completed? well, kiran, the government estimate s always been between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels a day. we have been producing with the various devices that have been on the well before the last cap was removed somewhere around 25,000 barrels a day. we have continued to flare off about 8,000 barrels a day and the helix producer will be coming online. we will have the capability to continue to produce but during the period when we actually try to do the well integrity test we will slowly take those producti production platforms offline because we have to close all the valves. admiral allen, thank you so much. good luck today with all the efforts to cap that well.