From Australia to Alaska, world energy producers carried on as usual on Jan. 1, with strategic oil and gas flows uninterrupted by the much-feared Y2K bug. Oil-consuming nations breathed a sigh of relief after potential trouble spots Iraq and Russia and key OPEC powers in the Gulf, Africa and Latin America passed an uneventful night. The IEA and the U.S. Department of Energy said there was no need to release emergency stockpiles of oil they had readied in case computer bugs caused a shortfall of energy supplies.
The nearest the computer-dependent international energy system came to a hint of a problem was an adjustment made by Turkey on the monitoring system on an
Iraqi oil pipeline. Turkey said it had set the date on the computerized system to 1995 from 1999 to avoid potential millennium bug problems.