Best Small Cos. This year, however, the world's oilfields will produce 4 billion more barrels of oil than they did in 1973. The price of oil doesn't determine the long-run supply of oil. There is only one explanation. When oil keeps gushing ever more copiously while its price holds steady, you have to conclude that the geophysical well isn't anywhere near empty.
Technology surprises people.
A paper published in Science in 1981 came up with what seemed to be a compelling argument for why oil wells would run dry. The inescapable conclusion was that no matter what the price of oil, it would be uneconomical to hunt for oil in the U.S. Didn't happen. The Science paper argued, among other things, that we'd be drilling a lot more dry holes. A slew of improvements in sensing technology and computer imaging transformed that end of the business. Nuclear magnetic resonance, which reveals tumors in bodies, likewise reveals oil in rock.