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Prices doubled for a time. But the shortage was largely offset by increased Saudi oil production, which went from 5.8 million barrels a day in August to 8.5 million by December, according to data in Energy Department's oil market contingency planning book.
Some analysts question whether Saudi Arabia actually has the spare capacity it says it has.
"We all take the Saudi assurances for granted," said Matthew Simmons, head of Simmons & Company International, a Houston-based energy advisory firm, but "the last time Saudi Arabia ever got close to 9 or 10 was in 1980. Their largest field is 55 years old, and they do not disclose their field-by-field production data, so we really don't know for sure."
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Government and industry oil experts praise the administration for its focus on energy security. But they say it has been too quiet about its plans, given how openly the issue is discussed in the oil markets and the administration's own push for more transparent oil markets.
Administration officials say they have adopted a cautious approach to avoid roiling the markets. "Something said casually could be misinterpreted and influence the markets," said one Energy Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
More than a half-century ago, the United States developed a close relationship with the Saudi ruling family, tacitly if not explicitly trading support for the government for access to oil.
But the events of Sept. 11 raised fresh questions in the United States about Saudi Arabia: 15 hijackers and much of Al Qaeda's finances came from the kingdom.
On the Saudi side, the American military presence in the country is one factor in the "increasingly open challenges" to the royal family's control, a recently released assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says.
Both governments insist that the relationship is as strong as ever. But the Pentagon has developed regional alternatives to the use of Saudi military installations, and a draft of a secret Congressional report has criticized the Saudis for not cooperating with Americans investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
Still, the prospects of a war with Iraq show how oil continues to bind Saudi Arabia's relationship with the United States.
The countries' dealings have always been marked by quiet diplomacy. But according to Bush advisers and officials, the fear that critics would, perhaps unfairly, link the administration's policies to the oil industry has added another layer of secrecy.
"If you are trying to talk about Iraq and if you were not encumbered by the fear that your actions would be linked to Exxon Mobil or the oil industry," said one Bush adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity, "you'd be talking about oil issues."
Vice President Dick Cheney tackled the issue of energy security in the administration's National Energy Policy report. The report noted that Saudi Arabia's policy of "investing in spare oil production capacity" had lessened the impact of oil supply disruptions in any region.
But the report also called for greater "diversity of world oil production." to avoid possible instability due to "concentration of world oil production in any one region of the world."
After Sept. 11, President Bush decided to increase the American strategic reserve to 700 million barrels. But some experts say more is needed, in part to reduce the importance of Persian Gulf producers like Saudi Arabia.
"You want to make it politically impossible for the Saudis to use their swing capacity as a political club," said James Woolsey, President Clinton's first C.I.A. director and one of the advocates of increasing the reserve to one billion barrels.
President Bush's national security strategy, released in September, proposed to "enhance energy security" by working with allies to "expand the sources and types of global energy supplied, especially in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, Central Asia and the Caspian region."
The strategy did not mention the Persian Gulf, the source of most of the world's known oil reserves and virtually all of the world's spare oil capacity.
Energy security issues were front and center two weeks ago in Washington at a conference on the economic consequences of an attack on Iraq. The conference was sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Panel members called for more complete and understandable data on oil markets, a position supported by the Bush administration. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham backed a Saudi initiative in that area during a forum in Japan.
Experts on the panel said Saudi Arabia's stated intention to fill in the supply gaps made the outlook for oil markets more favorable than it was after the sudden Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Moreover, the loss of Iraqi oil exports would be far less than the loss of 4.5 million barrels a day that occurred as a result of Iraq's invasion, which halted Kuwait's production, too.
But the center's analysis included some new problems and a few unknowns. Commercial petroleum stocks are much tighter today than in 1990, and there is less ability to substitute other fuels.
Furthermore, no one knows what President Saddam Hussein of Iraq might do to his own or his neighbors' oil fields, or whether sympathetic terrorists might hit oil targets in the region.