Electricity and black gold-the wealth of the desert

To get the most out of oil nowadays, a participant in the world oil business must deal with all aspects of exploration, production, refinement and marketing. For a major exporter such as Iraq, the complexity of managing all these tasks is aggravated by the need to balance internal demand with the need to generate foreign exchange. The author describes how, in order to ease co-ordination and resource planning, Iraq has started a new project to create a central planning and decision-support facility. The project will involve setting up a computing centre in Baghdad and linking it with the regional control systems that currently operate the pipelines, refineries and gas plants. The control facility will also gather consumption data from the major industrial users; all of this information will be used to help various governmental planning departments