http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,38458,00.html?owv

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, the White House Y2K czar today said work remains to be done within the oil and gas industries to meet set target dates for Year 2000 readiness.

John Koskinen, chairman of the The President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, during a press conference today said a recent government survey shows that oil and gas companies are making progress in their efforts to prepare for the date change, but some companies are still behind in their Y2K compliance efforts and don't expect that work to be complete until sometime in the fourth quarter.

"Businesses and government agencies that are projecting system completion dates late this year have limited flexibility for unexpected delays," Koskinen said in a prepared statement.

Therefore, he urged oil and gas companies to continue their efforts to remediate and test their computer systems, work with companies in their supply chain, and complete contingency plans, so as to prevent slippage in system completion schedules this fall.

The survey conducted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission includes information from companies that account for 93 percent of all the oil and gas consumed in the United States, according to Koskinen.

He said he was pleased to see the decrease in the number of companies reporting the lack of Y2K information from the telecom and electric power sectors as a major challenge. "Preparing for the date change requires continued information sharing across industry lines," he said.

The industry survey was the third assessment of Y2K readiness within the oil and gas industry. Another is due by the next quarter...

-- regular (zzz@z.z), June 28, 1999

Answers

If I hear Der Spinmeister say that Oil and Gas is not real time once more, I'm going to take what's left of my cash out of the bank.....I'm gonna fill up 10 5-gallon buckets of gas and stockpile some damn food....

I'm an oil analyst by trade. Our industry is as real time as it gets folks. In fact if the big metal thingy with the stacks and sulfur scrubbers isn't fed a steady diet of crude oil...it begins to burp and snarl. This is bad. Bad for you, bad for America and bad FOR THE CHILDREN..

Also, Kosky should realize that they have this thing in NY where all these guys holler and wave at each other....it's called the Nymex and there's a bunch of goobers in Chicago doing the same thing.... They're not waving for their freaking health. How much money moves thru there on a daily basis Johnny? A buttload!

Then there's the physical side of things. Let's see here last month we imported about 8.8 million bbls. of crude from foreign sources. So if my memory serves me correct, the Intnl. Monitoring Dweebs state that the disruptions will affect 70% of our imported crudes or roughly 6 million bbls with an average 23 day delay.

Hmmmm...the SPR (although it holds a lot of erl) is not very efficient when it comes to distribution of said crude (which by the way has been in a damn cavern with water and other crap for years and is of mixed quality). The SPR is capable of distributing a whopping total of 4 million bbls per day. That's right sportsfans. The equivalent of two VLCC's! Yeah baby! If they don't have any problems at the mouth of the monster.

Oh yeah I forgot. We need another VLCC and a half. Oh well (pun intended) maybe we can run more domestic. Oops! I forgot we bankrupt most of the domestic producers with our latest OPEC demolition derby routine. Damn!

And all of this assumes we have NO (thats nunc, nein, zip, zilch, zero) transportation problems at home. Remember those pipeline thingys that bring the crude through fifty gazillion counties accross this great fruited plain of ours? The ones that have occasional burps and groans without Y2K problems..

-- Jim Smith (cyberax@ix.netcom.com), June 28, 1999.

Jim,

I don't you if you saw these relevant threads on the Oil situation but if not, you should take a look at them... in your business, I think you will find them helpful if you were unaware of this new

data.http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000xLU

http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0010Vc

-- R.C. (racambab@mailcity.com), June 29, 1999.