On a bleak stretch of desert near the Iraq-Kuwait border - half a world away from the Gulf of Mexico and last year's nightmarish blowout - BP is riding high, rapidly developing one of the world's richest oil fields.
The British energy giant plans to drill 3,000 new wells here over the next 10 years and build a town from scratch to house 4,000 employees. BP and Iraqi officials hope the Rumaila field soon will become the second most productive in the world - after Saudi Arabia's Ghawar - propelling the country into competition with Saudi Arabia and its other powerful oil-producing neighbor, Iran.
Iraq sits on the world's third-largest oil reserves, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, with the biggest known fields lying under the windswept sands outside Basra. Despite aging pipelines, spotty electricity, chronic insecurity and a maze of inefficient bureaucracy, the oil sector is pressing an ambitious expansion plan that will determine Iraq's economic future long after the last American soldiers withdraw at the end of the year.
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