http://www.bloomberg.com/bbn/specialreport.html

Amidst all the happy-face reporting, this article has been reposted. If I remember correctly, Scary North was asked to pull the link to it by Bloomberg's lawyers last week. There are other interesting articles as well, including one that states the world will spend 311 BILLION dollars to fix the problem, according to First Data Research. Here is the oil article:

Fair Use/ Educational and Research purposes only

Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Gulf Arab states responsible for half the world's oil reserves may not be adequately prepared for the year 2000 computer problem, the United Nations and U.S. government officials said.

Computer failure and resulting disruption to production and transportation facilities in the six Arab Gulf states -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain -- could boost oil prices, which have already more than doubled this year.

Governments and companies in the Middle East won't be ready for the date changeover on Jan. 1, 2000, due to a lack of funding to deal with the ``millennium bug'' computer glitch, the United Nations has said in a report. The bug is a theoretical problem that may cause some computers to malfunction if they misread the two-digit date ``OO'' as 1900 instead of 2000.

``It would have been nice if they had started a year or two earlier, but we're optimistic there won't be any interruption in oil flow,'' said John Koskinen, chairman of the U.S. President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion. ``However, our oil inventories are sufficient to handle any eventuality for a few weeks.''

The U.S. government set up a reserve in 1975 to provide an emergency supply of oil in the event of a crisis, such as the Arab oil embargo of 1973. It currently holds about 573 million barrels of oil -- equal to two months of imports -- according to the Energy Department. The U.S. has tapped the reserve only once, in 1991, during the Persian Gulf War.

Oil companies doing business in the Gulf and local officials in the region said they are concerned about the lack of progress being made by government-run utilities, such as power and water.

Saudi Arabia Confident

However, Saudi Arabia, responsible for about 10 percent of the world's daily oil supply, said it is confident its computer systems will be ready to recognize the year 2000.

``Our worst case scenario would be to lose power for an extended period of time,'' said Saleh al-Zaid, head of the Y2K preparation team at Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company that exports more than 6 million barrels of oil per day.

``If that happened we would have enough oil stored at export terminals in the kingdom, Rotterdam and the U.S. to meet all our customers' requirements for about eight to nine days,'' he said.

Most of Saudi Arabia's critical oil installations have their own power plants. These include the Abqaiq facility, which can process 6 million barrels a day, as well as export terminals on the Gulf, gateway for 90 percent of its oil exports.

Mexico Ready, Too

Venezuela and Mexico, two other large exporters to the U.S., also said supplies won't be disrupted by computer breakdowns, and guaranteed all deliveries in the first days of 2000. They agreed to make up shortfalls in world output elsewhere if hobbled by the millennium bug.

Other Gulf producers, however, may not be in good shape.

Kuwait, which holds 9.3 percent of known global reserves, said the various components of its oil industry -- production, refining, shipping -- have different timetables for dealing with the computer bug.

``The production side is the most advanced and is finished testing,'' said Mifhari al-Obaid, an assistant managing director at the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp. ``In an emergency we would be able to run manually if the data systems stop.''

At least one-third of all nations won't have fully tested and fixed their computers by Jan. 1, despite the expenditure of between $300 billion and $600 billion by the world's companies and governments, according to analysts.

``As far as some of the oil companies in the area, a lot of them have just looked at what we call the front-end IT systems, and have not looked at the embedded systems,'' said Ron Nelson, a Dubai-based Y2K computer consultant.

Hidden Threat

Embedded systems consist of computer chips used outside of computers -- in power-distribution equipment, pipeline pump controls and other devices. ``Everyone considered Y2K as a PC-based problem, when in reality it was much larger,'' he said.

U.S. companies are joining in the fight against time in the Persian Gulf. Exxon Mobil Corp. said it is working with its joint venture operations in Saudi Arabia to prepare for the bug. ``We have organized training workshops and set up different in-house committees to tackle this issue,'' said Curtis Brand, chief executive officer of Mobil Saudi Arabia Inc. ``We are ... comfortable with the progress.''

Saudi Aramco and Exxon Mobil are partners in the SAMREF refinery on the kingdom's west coast, which refines about 350,000 barrels a day of crude oil into gasoline, jet fuel and gasoil, a group of fuels that includes heating oil.

-- ariZONEa (In_line@exxon_station.com), December 27, 1999

Answers

Now isn't that just too wierd. Think I'm gonna go out now and cap off my gas tank before the price jumps by morning...

-- Marsha (MSykes@court.co.macon.il.us), December 27, 1999.

Bloomberg Link

Koskinen forgot to mention this in his just completed PR session on C- SPAN2 with a room full of ignorant press.

-- PJC (paulchri@msn.com), December 27, 1999.