British Petroleum (BP) BP has made promising strides in its latest bid to capture some of the oil spewing from its ruptured deep-sea well in the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama has called off an overseas trip and prepared for another visit on Friday to the spill-stricken U.S. Gulf Coast.

BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said the containment cap “should work” by capturing upward of 90 percent of the gushing oil.

“I’d like to see us capture 90 plus per cent of this flow. I think that’s possible with this design,” Suttles told CBS TV.

“It should work,” he added in another interview with CNN.

After failing days ago to plug the well, BP Plc managed on Thursday to shear away the gushing well pipe a mile (1.6 km) below the ocean surface, then lowered a containment cap over the jagged hole left atop the crippled wellhead assembly in its latest bid to curtail the oil flow.

British energy giant BP, facing a criminal probe by the U.S. government, civil lawsuits, lost share value and growing questions about credit-worthiness, set an eagerly awaited investors’ briefing conference call with chief executive Tony Hayward for 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT).

BP shares were up four per cent in European trading on Friday after word of the apparent progress in curbing the spill.

Pressure is building on BP to suspend dividend payments, which total 10.5 billion dollars a year, and divert cash to dealing with the spill and clean-up.

Hayward was coy on the issue on Thursday, telling reporters in Houston, “We will meet our obligations to stakeholders.”

Two Democratic U.S. senators have called on BP to suspend shareholder dividends until the full cost of the cleanup is known.

London-based investment bank Evolution Securities said in a research note, “We believe BP will bow to political pressure in the U.S. and suspend dividend payments for the remainder of 2010.”

The placement of the cylindrical containment cap was confirmed by the U.S. disaster response chief, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, in a statement describing the move as a “positive development” but “only a temporary and partial fix.”

“It will be some time before we can confirm that this method will work and to what extent it will mitigate the release of oil into the environment,” Allen said.

Once the containment cap is firmly in place over the wellhead, the plan is to start funneling at least some of the escaping oil and gas into a large hose that would carry it from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico to the surface, where it would be collected in ships and safely removed.

Confronting one of the biggest tests of his presidency as his party girds for tough congressional elections in November, Obama called off a trip to Australia and Indonesia set for this month to focus more on the oil spill and other matters.

The White House said in a statement early on Friday that Obama spoke on Thursday night to Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to inform them of his decision.

The trip had been scheduled for June 13-19.

Crude oil has been pouring unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico at up to 19,000 barrels (800,000 gallons/three million litres) a day since an explosion April 20.

The explosion demolished a BP-contracted drilling platform off the coast of Louisiana, killin  g 11 crewmen and unleashing an environmental disaster of epic proportions.