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North Sea oil drilling rigs are threatened by y2k. Then all the rest of them are, too.
Without oil, we're back to 1850. Supertankers are not y2k compliant. Pipeline transmission is dependent on noncompliant computers. Now it's off-shore drilling.
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Companies such as Royal Dutch/Shell and British Petroleum said they realize they are sitting on a time bomb and are racing against the clock to check millions of microprocessors. But, they fear smaller firms have not yet fully grasped the threat to the oil industry.
At the ``Project 2000 in Oil and Gas'' conference, industry suppliers and service providers were warned that time is running out and urged to act soon to prevent major upheaval.
``Stop talking about it, but do it,'' said Ian Smailes, automation project engineer at Total Oil Marine.
The oil industry faces a gargantuan task to fight the millennium bug, illustrated by the fact a single offshore oil platform may contain over 10,000 microprocessors. Some are deep below sea level, but all need to be checked.
To put this into further perspective, there are over a 100 platforms in the North Sea alone.
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