SLB Schlumberger Ltd

BP Plc (BP)'s effort to cap a massive deepwater oil spill using heavy drilling fluids will be implemented early next week, an executive said Friday.

The drilling fluid will be injected into the damaged well "sometime early in the coming week," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said in a conference call. "Probably Tuesday." The U.K.-based oil giant is working to put all the equipment into place to perform the so-called "top-kill" operation, which includes a "very large barge" filled with drilling "mud," Suttles said.

The executive said that the company it is siphoning an average of 2,000 barrels of oil per day from the leaking well directly to a vessel on the surface. The update comes a day after BP said that it was collecting 5,000 barrels of oil a day, or as much crude as was officially estimated to be gushing out of the mile-deep well. That figure forced BP to admit that the leak is larger than previously thought. Suttles said that the variation is due to wide fluctuations in the rate of oil being captured.

Sharp criticism of BP's effort to control the spill spiked on Thursday, as heavy patches of oil reached the Louisiana shore. Federal officials criticized the company's inability to accurately assess the estimate, and the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the company to find a less toxic dispersant to break down the oil. At the Friday press conference, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry criticized BP's clean-up work on Terrebonne Parish, an afflicted area in the western part of Louisiana, where response crews were slow to move as the oil washed up on the beach. "We are a little disappointed with the work on Terrebone Parish," Landry said. "We saw that boom has been pre-staged, skimmers were there but there was hesitation to deploy that."

"We are redoubling our efforts to ensure the Parish gets the same kind of resources and same kind of attention that the other parishes or areas of Louisiana are getting," Landry added. The admiral said that efforts to fight oil in other parts of Louisiana and in the high seas were progressing well, in part due to good weather. BP's Suttles said that no oil had reached the coasts of Alabama, Mississippi and Florida.

Suttles said the company hadn't yet identified any dispersants that were less toxic than the one being used, which he said is "the most widely used" in the world. "We're going to continue to look at other options," he said.

BP shares closed down 1.62% at $43.86 in New York, even as the broader market recovered from Thursday's sharp sell-off. The company's stock has lost about a quarter of its value since the Transocean Ltd. (RIG) rig Deepwater Horizon, which was drilling a well for the company, caught fire and sank, killing 11 people. The spill was discovered shortly after the rig sank.

Earlier Friday, BP challenged the accuracy of some third-party estimates that have put the amount of oil flowing from the spill at 50,000 barrels a day or higher. The company said in a statement Friday that these estimates are too high because they are not taking into account distortions in the shape of the leaking pipeline and the volume of gas that is escaping.

Most of BP's attempts to contain or shut down the spill have failed, but things began looking up for the company on Sunday when its bid to siphon oil from the well succeeded. Even as it plans to clog the well with heavy drilling fluid, the company is drilling two relief wells to permanently shut down the well, an effort that is scheduled to take months.

The drilling of the first relief well is progressing "slightly ahead of schedule," Suttles said.

-By Angel Gonzalez and Isabel Ordonez, 713-547-9214; angel.gonzalez@dowjones.com

(James Herron contributed to this story)

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