Recent Message about Y2K and Oil Sent by a "Y2K Worker" to a Reporter

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I share the following message because of the interest people may have in looking into the possibilities suggested there. These possibilities involve Y2K-related port and wellhead problems and other oil-related problems in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the world where a "fix on failure" approach might have been taken pre-rollover or where remediation or repair efforts have been incomplete or otherwise lacking. The political opinions expressed are those of the author of the message.

From: [Anonymous Y2K Worker] To: [A Newspaper Reporter] Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2000 12:59 PM Subject: Oil

...I've had the feeling that you've been skeptical of my suspicions that oil production limits are still partly due to Y2K problems. What can you tell me to reduce those suspicions? Can you debunk an imagined scenario? Let us remember that PLC (programmed logic controller) microchips exist in overabundance just about everywhere in the oil production milieu. We know from public record that many such did in fact fail the Y2K test and had to be replaced. Let us suppose that Saudi Arabia oil production facilities are heavily infested with such, at wellhead, in transport, and at transshipment ports. Let us remember that the US Secretary of Energy traveled to Saudi Arabia much earlier this year, to ask them to agree to increase their production. And they did agree. But let us also remember that this happened many months ago, and has not yet been translated into such actions. And that highly publicized predictions of price downturn have not been realized. Not here, and especially not in the UK and France and such. Of course one could ask why the UK, which has a North Sea tap to turn on a little more. Let's make an outrageous assumption that Saudi wellheads are failing due to those PLCs. Let us make the equally silly assumption that the transshipment port of Yanbu, a highly automated facility, is unable to operate properly. Let us suspect that the Saudi culture, like that of an earlier Japan, is "different" from ours. Even less open. And that they also sustain pressures from the rest of the Arab world, which is notably hostile to US culture. Under such imagined circumstances, would not the Saudis be likely to lie a little? Promise everything, like our current government does, to delay the day of realization? Laugh on the way to the bank with the ransom from those alien Westerners? Crazy thoughts, surely. But do the expected symptoms of this far-out scenario not match pretty closely the real and actual symptoms that we see today? Paranoia, I suppose, for surely [your paper] would never shrink from investigating if there was the slightest possibility of it being real. And surely that newspaper has a pipeline (!) into the closed Saudi society.

-- Paula Gordon (pgordon@erols.com), September 20, 2000

Answers

Amendment to the above:

All of the message to the newpaper reporter should be in quotes and the last line before my name should be followed by:

[End of message sent by an "Anonymous Y2K Worker" to a Reporter]

-- Paula Gordon (pgordon@erols.com), September 20, 2000.


Here I go out on the limb. I have a gut feeling that the above is not far from the truth. I post a lot of articles and actually read a large portion of them. There are a lot of contradicting stories published about the OPEC situation. I really haven't seen any concrete evidence that anything is happening(more output)as of yet. I sincerely believe that it is market manipulation and obfuscating. Since we really don't know what is happening in these closed societies all we can do is continue to look for clues as to what is really going on.

Analyst mode off.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), September 20, 2000.


Hi Martin,

I hope you have a chance to take a look at the URL I cross posted earlier. It contains a lot of food for thought regarding oil: http://ard.com/fdownstreamventurespetroleummarkets.showMessage? topicID=1381.topic

-- Paula Gordon (pgordon@erols.com), September 20, 2000.


Spider has provided an active link to that website in the thread at http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003pu0 The thread is "Discussion of Oil and Gas Problems" posted on GICC 9- 20-2000.

-- Paula Gordon (pgordon@erols.com), September 20, 2000.

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