My earlier posting was deleted. Perhaps because I posted it in the original Spanish text with a translation below. My email is real if anyone wants to contact me for confirmation.

I have been sending some of the postings on this forum to my friend, Manuel Diaz, from Colombia. Manuel recently sent one of the postings on Oil production in Saudi Arabia to a friend and fellow engineer in Colombia, to ask for his comments. Below is the email he (the Colombian oil engineer) sent to Manuel. This is the translation in English. If anyone wants the Spanish, let me know and I will send it to you.

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About your concern: believe me, you have good reason to be worried. At least in Colombia, for more than a year and a half, our company has been developing contingencies to try to reduce the impact that the date change may cause. A great amount of effort has been spent as well as an immense amount of money. Nevertheless, because of the technical complexity, there are still many "lakes" or unknown areas in the refineries and wells where we do not know what will happen. In some cases the companies that designed these systems no longer exist, in others, there have been so many modifications over the years that we no longer know how it works.

At the international level things are not much different. The oil industry lacks proper documentation of many technical processes and for that reason how they function or how to fix them. Control and regulation systems may go "crazy" when the date changes. At any rate, there are contingency plans in place for these posibilities. Plans are being developed for security and for manual workarounds, and to control accidents as well as emergency supplies in case of a work stopage.

In conclusion, one can expect some disruptions in the production processes, refining and transport which will all probably have an effect on the market, but we hope that the impact will be minimal and short term.

If I come across any documents of interest on this theme that might interest you, I'll send them along.

-- JoseMiami (caris@prodigy.net), November 30, 1999

Answers

Oil problems in Colombia (JoseMiami, caris@prodigy.net, 1999-11-29)
Still There.

-- Dan G (thepcguru@hotmail.com), November 30, 1999.

Sorry, Dan, I didn't quiet catch your drift.

after reading my post, I realize that it is not real clear where my comments stop and the Colombian Oil Engineer's start, so I will post it again here below with quotes:

--- "About your concern: believe me, you have good reason to be worried. At least in Colombia, for more than a year and a half, our company has been developing contingencies to try to reduce the impact that the date change may cause. A great amount of effort has been spent as well as an immense amount of money. Nevertheless, because of the technical complexity, there are still many "lakes" or unknown areas in the refineries and wells where we do not know what will happen. In some cases the companies that designed these systems no longer exist, in others, there have been so many modifications over the years that we no longer know how it works.

At the international level things are not much different. The oil industry lacks proper documentation of many technical processes and for that reason how they function or how to fix them. Control and regulation systems may go "crazy" when the date changes. At any rate, there are contingency plans in place for these posibilities. Plans are being developed for security and for manual workarounds, and to control accidents as well as emergency supplies in case of a work stopage.

In conclusion, one can expect some disruptions in the production processes, refining and transport which will all probably have an effect on the market, but we hope that the impact will be minimal and short term.

If I come across any documents of interest on this theme that might interest you, I'll send them along."

-- JoseMiami (caris@prodigy.net), November 30, 1999.

What Dan G was saying is that your original posting thread http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001t2x is still there, it has not been deleted.

-- Ken Seger (kenseger@earthlink.net), November 30, 1999.

Thank you Jose for posting this in a separate thread. I think I miss out on some good info often because I can not find time to read all the threads. Perhaps too much is not worth reading. Thanks again.

-- Long Time Lurker (1234@7896K.com), November 30, 1999.

... and Columbia is much better remediated than many others affecting Central America and oil refining and storage; most notably Panama (in general), Mexico, Venezula, Saudia Ariaba, Russia, Libya, Iran, Iraq, ..... and the Caribean islands where international oil is transhipped and refined.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), November 30, 1999.