Obama lunched with locals, talked up tourism and seafood industries and checked on disaster mitigation efforts on his fourth trip to the region, on the eve of his Oval Office address on America's worst environmental disaster.

After days lashing BP over its response to the crisis, Obama said Monday talks with the London-based giant had been "constructive" after the administration pressed for an escrow account to compensate disaster victims.

While it was still too early to comment on preliminary discussions, Obama raised hopes of a breakthrough before his planned meeting with BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg at the White House on Wednesday.

"My hope is that by the time the chairman and I meet on Wednesday that we've made sufficient progress that we can start actually seeing a structure that would be in place," he said, at a staging post for oil clean-up efforts here.

White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton said that the fund, to quickly process legitimate claims for compensation for people who had seen livelihoods hit by the disaster, would reach "billions" of dollars.

Obama's overnight visit to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida represented a new bid to engineer a political pivot point in the two-month environmental and political crisis unleashed by the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in April.

His three previous visits to the disaster zone took place in Louisiana, but the expanded itinerary was a sign of the expanding footprint of the crisis spawned by the massive oil slick and the rising criticism of his own performance.

Obama also lamented the threat to the unique Gulf of Mexico coastline, with its wetlands brimming with wildlife, sparkling white beaches and lucrative fishing industry in waters teeming with shrimps, crabs and edible fish.

A large chunk of those fishing grounds are now closed, as the oil pours out of a busted undersea well BP has tried but failed to plug, and some fishing fleets are tied up in port with little hope of resuming work.

Obama said he understood fears that the thick oil slick, which has clogged wetlands, fouled beaches and killed seabirds could "have a long-term impact on a way of life that has been passed on for generations."

He said his administration would do "everything in our power to protect the Gulf way of life so that it's there for our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren."

In Gulfport, Mississippi, the president munched on shrimp and mini crab cakes to show local seafood was safe and implored Americans to visit the dazzling white sands of the southern coast.

Later in Theodore, Alabama, he said: "Let me be clear seafood from the Gulf today is safe to eat but we need to make sure it stays that way," announcing a multi-agency effort to protect the regional seafood industry.

"I had some of that seafood for lunch and it was delicious."

Washington-based news organization Politico earlier ran an interview in which Obama vowed to push for a radical overhaul of US energy policy to wean the country off foreign oil and dangerously deep drilling.

"In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come," Obama said.

Obama also issued a call for a new energy future in an email blitz to members of his Organizing for America political action group, saying "the time has come, once and for all" to "fully embrace a new future."

In London, BP's already pummeled shares plunged more then 10 percent to 351 pence in late afternoon trade.

Earlier reports suggested BP would bow to massive US pressure and decide to suspend dividend payments as its potential liability over the oil spill soars.

BP met a 48-hour ultimatum Sunday to present a new plan to roughly triple the amount of oil it is capturing from the ruptured undersea well by the end of June, to more than 50,000 barrels, 2.1 million gallons, a day.

The company is currently siphoning up about 15,000 barrels of oil a day to a ship on the surface, about half the amount believed to be still streaming into the Gulf from the ruptured wellhead.

BP now plans to bring a vessel for producing and storing oil from South America, two additional tankers from Europe and a 3,800-foot, six-inch flexible pipe from Brazil.

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