But the overall contribution of these low flow rates are small so who cares about the economics of 5 vs 50 barrel a day wells. What I think your missing is once you drill a horizontal well the opportunities for rework are small. They are very efficient and basically give a square production profile. The key is that production profiles from horizontal drilling are quit different from traditional approaches and at the end of the day decline is much steeper. Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that if you produce using horizontals once production collapses you move on with no attempts to work over.

Also another point is that technology does not makes production from deeper offshore regions equivalent to shallow or on shore wells. Its a apples to oranges comparison yet over time more and more of our production has come for deeper and deeper offshore regions.

The net effect is that the amount of oil that can be produced at high production rates has dropped far faster then the production rate and thus we have extracted our easy oil a lot faster over time. The easy high flow rate oil is gone. One reason I don't like URR the bulk of the oil that extractable on the back side would be extracted at a lot lower flow rates compared to the front and the economics esp offshore points towards little of this oil as actually being recovered.

We are facing the collapse of two major sources for oil. Offshore and the giant fields. One because horizontal drilling and conditions makes workovers or low production uneconomic and the second because we have already worked over the giant fields extensively. The total amount of oil remaining may not drop that much over the next few years but it makes sense that production rates will decline fairly steeply.