BP Plc (BP) said Thursday that it had temporarily stopped pumping heavy drilling fluids into a gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico as it studied the effect of the "top kill" operation and restocked vessels containing the blocking material.

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said that the company had stopped pumping mud around 11 p.m. Wednesday in order to assess the results of the first phase of the top kill and monitor pressure in the well.

Suttles said the mud pumping would resume later Thursday evening. He added that the operation would continue for at least another day.

"The operation has not yet achieved its objective," he said, in that oil was continuing to flow to the surface. "We've successfully pumped some mud into the well bore; clearly we need to pump more in."

The company temporarily stopped the flow of hydrocarbons while it was pumping drilling mud at high pressure Wednesday, but pressure from the well pushed back out into the ocean a combination of oil, gas and drilling fluid when the pumping stopped.

The company did two rounds of pumping Wednesday evening; Suttles said that nothing in the operation has "gone wrong" or behaved unexpectedly.

Suttles said that BP would deploy a "junk shot," a procedure that involves injecting material such as rubber tires and golf balls to clog up a valve atop the well, making sure the drilling mud is sent down the well bore.

Video transmitted live from the sea floor by BP showed a large amount of material being ejected from a broken piece of equipment into the ocean. Suttles said that "it's very, very difficult to interpret" the meaning of that flow.

Suttles' comments, made at a press conference in Robert, La., followed remarks by Adm. Thad Allen, the leader of the federal response effort to the spill, who said earlier that the flow of oil had been stopped by the top kill operation. Federal authorities, the public and the oil industry are closely watching the progress of the operation, which could bring the massive spill to a close. The spill began more than a month ago when a rig drilling for BP exploded and sank.

On Thursday a team of U.S. scientists unveiled new estimates for the amount of hydrocarbons leaking into the Gulf that showed that the spill is at least as big as the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and perhaps much larger. That makes it the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Criticism of the company and the federal government's handling of the crisis ran high Thursday, as oil lapped up along Louisiana's coastline. Also Thursday, President Barack Obama extended a moratorium on new drilling permits and ordered the halting of exploratory drilling in 33 U.S. Gulf of Mexico leases.

At the news conference, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said that about 101 miles of Louisiana shore were affected by the oil spill.

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

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