Ahmed Raafat is 25 and studying for a masters degree in petroleum engineering at Cairo University.

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Expertise in this domain, especially petroleum engineering, is what differentiates the IT companies that work with these customers, and not their in-depth knowledge of technology.

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Iraj Ershaghi, director of petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California, says only about a third of Los Angeles' available oil has been recovered.

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He moved back to the company's base in London and held a series of finance jobs, wedding his knowledge of petroleum engineering to the discipline of return on investment.

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In the late '80s and '90s, nobody went into petroleum engineering, so now companies must rely on a cadre of aging graybeards plus an influx of newbies who can't come onstream fast enough.

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Employing first Chinese graduates of these colleges as liaison staff (and later Mandarin-speaking African college graduates), multinationals should sponsor Chinese faculty research in key areas like petroleum engineering, manufacturing operations and international commerce, and seek out talented students from Angola, Zambia, Congo and Sudan.

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Add to this the work of Matthew Simmons, who in his 2005 book, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, analyzed papers presented at Petroleum Engineering conferences, and concluded that the super-giant Ghawar field would soon enter a period of decline.

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However, the textiles, fur and leather sector fell by 8.3%, and there was contraction in engineering and allied industries (-0.8%), chemicals, coke, refined petroleum products and nuclear fuel (-3.2%) and metals and metal products (-0.4%).

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