i have known Ali (the author of the piece) for a long time. And what he says, within context, is true.  (And sometime in the future I hope to get around to explaining in more detail some of the production techniques he mentions).  But what he misses is the volume part of the equation.  If a well is producing 10,000 bd with a 30% water cut, it is producing 7,000 bd of oil.  When that water:oil ratio rises to 1 then it is producing 5,000 bd oil, and when it rises to 12 then the well is producing only 769 bd.  To sustain production you have to drill more wells, and you are probably putting these as either infill or step-out from the existing ones so that the field will already be flooded (and you are hoping to take advantage of that for your production).  The problem is that with maximum reservoir contact and intelligent well control (the valves in the wells that were shown in that post) you get the production by draining the field out several kilometers per well.  Thus your well spacing increases (I have explained earlier that with a conventional well it is about 400 yds).  Thus you can only put a lower density of wells into the field.  Thus the theoretical argument for long term production,  applied from the case of conventional wells (of which there are thousands over Texas to get that production) cannot be applied to the MRC well case.