BP Plc (BP, BP.LN) said Wednesday it is still conducting tests to determine whether it can plug a massive U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil spill using heavy drilling fluids, even as it continued to alleviate the leak by siphoning oil from a gushing deepwater well and pondering other options.

The company had previously signaled that it could start the "top-kill" operation, which would flood the damaged Macondo well with so-called drilling mud, on Wednesday morning. In an update posted on its website early Wednesday, the company said that diagnostics are still being carried out. The decision to move forward will be made when the tests are completed, the company said. The top-kill procedure could take up to two days to implement, and it's unclear how long it will take for BP to find out the results, the company said.

A BP spokesperson said that in the last 24 hours the company had captured 2,600 barrels of crude through a tube connecting a surface vessel to the damaged underwater infrastructure, slightly above the average 2,000 barrels of crude a day siphoned since that effort began last week. The leak, which began after the explosion and sinking of the Transocean Ltd. (RIG) Deepwater Horizon drilling rig more than a month ago, has an estimated rate of at least 5,000 barrels of oil a day.

The latest effort by the U.K.-based oil giant is being closely watched by federal authorities and by the entire oil industry, which faces an onslaught of regulation in the wake of the spill, one of the worst ever seen in the U.S.

At a shareholders' meeting in Dallas on Wednesday, Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)'s Chief Executive Rex Tillerson said that Exxon, the world's largest publicly-traded oil company, continues to provide assistance to BP in dealing with the disaster. "We are eager to support efforts to determine how such an incident can be prevented in the future," he said.

Chevron Corp. (CVX) Chief Executive John Watson said at his company's shareholder meeting in Houston on Wednesday that the industry is going to learn "a great deal" out of the spill.

"If there's something we have to adopt, we will adopt it," he said.

BP said that if the top-kill operation fails, it will move a containment system over the spill to try to capture the oil. To do that, the company will first have to remove a damaged pipe, known as the riser, that was bent when the Transocean rig sank last April. Then BP would place a "cap" atop the pipe leading out of the blow-out preventer, a large valve that sits atop the well, and siphon the oil to a surface vessel.

The cap is already on site and could be deployed by the end of May, BP said.

BP is also mulling lowering a second blow-out preventer. Concurrently, the company is drilling two relief wells, but they are expected to take months to complete.

-By Angel Gonzalez, Dow Jones Newswires; 713-547-9214; angel.gonzalez@dowjones.com

(Isabel Ordonez and Susan Daker contributed to this article.)
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