I suspect he and many of the civil servants that guide his responses share the belief common in those that have not learnt about oil exploration that oil occurs in random pockets with a uniform probability in any one area and these are found by sinking a wildcat. Such beliefs may not be explicitly formulated but shape their attitude to the expectation of future discoveries.

The fact that there have been relatively few wildcats drilled  in the middle east in recent years is not proof of lack of exploration. Few areas have not had some preliminary survey such as aerial magnetic surveys and in the more promising areas seismic surveys.

For oil to be found there need to be five geological features, the absence of any one of which will mean no oil. There needs to be:-

1. A source rock which had massive organic deposits.
   
2. This needs to be or have been in the right range of depths (and hence temperature) for sufficient time for the deposits to change into oil and not to go further and become natural gas.
   
3. Porous reservoir rocks above the source rocks.
   
4. Impervious cap rocks above the reservoir rocks.
   
5. Trap formations that the oil can rise and collect in.

As Colin Campbell frequently points out this has occurred only rarely in time and place.

Many of the advances in oil technology have been in enabling  these conditions to be located without drilling. Many of the middle east areas that have not been drilled are so because they have been ruled out by other surveys.

It is a sobering realisation that there are till dry wildcats, in some places at greater frequency than before, despite these advances in survey technology. It is and indication of the desperate need to run ever faster just to stay still let alone increase production.

We need more surveys to find each of the remaining fields. The fields are becoming smaller. The quality of the oil is falling giving less net energy per barrel extracted and producing more carbon dioxide. We need at least as many wildcats as the small fields found are less clearly distinguishable. Wildcats are at least as often dry because in desperation poorer prospects are drilled. More resources are required to drill the wildcats and production facilities where successful as these are in more difficult locations. The price of the same type of facility is increasing massively are demands grows wildly and supply is limited. Skilled workers become impossible to find as demand increases and older workers die or retire and fewer young workers replace them. The political, environmental and social difficulties of new developments increase as the crucial importance of energy supplies and preventing climate change becomes more widely recognised.

All these factors are likely to get ever worse until we can no longer keep up.

Back to the Texas case history, higher oil prices + more drilling + 14% more producing wells = 30% less production 10 years after the peak.  We found more oil, and we are finding more oil in Texas, but we couldn't--and can't--make up for the declines in the large, old oil fields.  IMO, this is why we can compare Texas & the Lower 48 to Saudi Arabia & the world.  

To give you an idea of how deep the denial goes, the Texas State Geologist (a government employee) said at a public meeting, in response to a pointed question by me, that while "we may not be able to equal our peak production, we can substantially increase our production through the use of better technology."  We have never, not once, shown year over year production increases since we peaked in 1972.  So, 33 years after peak production, government talking heads were talking seriously about the possibility of getting back close to our peak production.