The Oil Drum

Dave, thanks for a wonderful post. Enhanced oil recovery and redeveloping old oil and gas fields is one of my professional interests. I believe its a sure thing to take place on the downhill slope. And it will darn sure help ease the transition.
  But don't expect this to be cheap oil. Every prospect has to be examined on a well-by-well  basis for the economics, and it will favor independents with low overhead, the Majors can't support huge overhead with hundreds of thousands of stripper wells. But, I expect them to sell off the remainder of their production in the next ten years or so as they would get rid of most of their political problems by doing so and declining world production will have hugely higher lifting costs.
  Texas and Louisiana are full of fields that were drilled and produced before production methods allowed even a 30% recovery. I think many operators could raise production of many of them by 10%  or more by reentering wells and side-tracking to recover attic oil, starting waterflood and using other methods like microbiological enhancement of the resercvoirs to lower gravity. But, it will require a lot of land, geological, geophsical and engineering work, and all of these talents are in short supply.