Anyone interested in seeing some good chart "profiles" of both the natural gas industry and the oil industry, including percent of electric utility use, can go to:

http://www.ferc.fed.us/Y2K/g4forweb.html

http://www.ferc.fed.us/Y2K/g3forweb.html

A presentation of the Oil/Gas Internal System Configuration (telecom dependencies) is at:

http://www.ferc.fed.us/Y2K/g1forweb.html

The minutes of the 2/3/1999 Oil and Gas Energy Working Group are at:

http://www.ferc.fed.us/y2k/minutes2399.htm

There are some concerns expressed in this meeting which I did not see noted in later articles. The low response rate of public gas systems is one, Katie Hirning emphasizing that Mr. Koskinen and the President's Council stressed the importance of being more effective in getting out the message that progress is being made is another.

Also, Hank Marrangoni of the Defense Energy Supply Center (DESC) "expressed concern regarding the rule of individual company diligence as it relates to surveying suppliers with contracts for verification of Y2K readiness. This is especially important for individual installation field commanders and individual oil or gas suppliers. DESC is looking for reasonable assurance from those who supply the bases that they will be ready."

It was also mentioned that the President's Council has established an emergency response working group to address any post-January 1 problems. The group is developing reference lists for contacts to be used in the event of an emergency situation, and to aid the industry in contingency planning.

-- Anonymous, February 25, 1999

Answers

In the Internal Systems Configuration slide, it is a curious thing to me that the SCADA master station data input and subsequent pipeline operations data output appear to be on the wrong side of a "bad data" firewall...

-- Anonymous, February 28, 1999

I'm all for the part about getting out the message that progress is being made. I'll do my part :)

Feb. 18 Press Release from the American Petrolium Institute

Headline: Oil, Gas Industries Y2K Efforts Show Marked ImprovementSurvey

"The latest survey on oil and gas industry Y2K readiness, presented by the Natural Gas Council and the American Petroleum Institute on behalf of the gas and oil industries (members listed at the end of the release) to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission today, shows that most companies are in the final stages of their Y2K repair programs. Almost all94 percentindicated they will be Y2K Ready by Sept. 30, 1999. The survey, completed at the end of January, is a follow-up to the initial gas-oil industry Y2K survey last summer.

Based on these survey results, we believe that we are well on our way to being Y2K Ready when Jan. 1, 2000 arrives so that consumers will have an uninterrupted flow of fuel for heating, transportation and industrial uses, said Oliver G. Rick Richard III, chairman, CEO and president of Columbia Energy Group. Richard is the gas and oil industries representative on the senior advisory group of the Presidents Council on the Year 2000 Conversion."

Also see CNET News Story: Oil, gas industries "on track" for Y2K

"One "key" discovery appears to fly in the face of Y2K experts' earlier concerns that the amount of embedded chips found throughout the industry performing various functions would make it difficult to find most of them, test them and, if needed, replace them before the end of the year. Experts feared this could possibly causing mass failures. However, the API study found that embedded chips do not pose a significant problem for the industries," Ron Quiggins, director, Year 2000 Program, Shell Services and chairman of the API Year 2000 Task Force, said in a statement. "We're not finding the embedded chip failures that we thought we had."

Huh? No embedded chip failures at the bottom of those off-shore rigs that we can't even reach to fix?? ;)

Regards, FactFinder

-- Anonymous, March 01, 1999

" "We're not finding the embedded chip failures that we thought we had."

This isn't really dispositive. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 1999