The potential of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques is well known, after over four decades of experience in the field.

What that experience has shown is that (with a few minor exceptions) improved technology cannot move the peak. What it does is increase, over time, the overall amount of oil that can be produced. On the bell curve, it thickens and lengthens the tail. But it does not change the time at which production peaked.

Deepwater drilling, another relatively new oil field technology, has been similarly oversold. What we have found is that deepwater fields tend to “crash” at up to 20% rates of depletion once they pass the peak.

Some oil analysts, such as Peter Jackson and Daniel Yergin of CERA, have routinely overstated the potential of improved technology as a way of denying the reality of peak oil. ASPO-USA’s direct challenge to their estimates remains unanswered.