Hmmm, maybe, but anyway my position is that both sides of the issue should be presented in any objective article. Are you suggesting however in your original post that the Washington post should have simply left out the argument on the other side of the issue?

Thanks for the "expert" nod. No one that works with me would call me that. A water flood is a secondary recovery method. And yes, I've seen some folks try additional tertiary efforts (usually pumping in some chemical with the water) and these seldom ever add much but they are relatively cheap to do and, thus, are economically viable.

And, yes, that’s was my point: if you try to estimate increased recovery by secondary methods from fields that have already undergone secondary recovery you doing worse than double dipping. You're using not only the original recovery volume but also that gained from the secondary efforts. I can't speak for the rest of the world but I know Texas fairly well. And there are very few fields of size that haven't undergone serious water flooding or other secondary recovery methods for most of their lives. The only opportunities would be with relatively new oil fields and there just aren't many of those around these days. Bottom line: speculating about significantly increasing global recovery via secondary recovery methods is wasted breath (IMHO). Been there...done that...got the t-shirt...and now looking for something else to do.

miscible co2 flooding has been used "successfully" in a number of areas in mature waterfloods to mobilize additional oil. notably fields in the permian basin, rangley field in colorado, wertz and lost soilder in wyoming and more recently anadarko is claiming 7000 bopd incremental from co2 at salt creek, wyoming( i doubt one will find a more mature field than that*).

financing is a major obstacle.

*see "the teapot dome scandal" by laton mccartney for details.

Remember the day you first heard about peak oil?? Remember your reaction?

Yes: "well, of course - it's a finite resource, so it's got to peak sometime. People say it's now? Let's see what the numbers say..."

There is a world of positions between the extremes of denial and doomerism.

And then, how long did it take before you finally accepted the reality of a peak in your lifetime?

About 0.3 seconds - it seemed highly likely the moment I considered it.

The point of contention is generally not "will oil peak?" - everyone agrees with that. Almost everyone agrees it'll happen before 2050, too, which is "soon" to a certain degree.

The point of contention is "what will peak oil mean?"

I don't see people disagreeing when doomers say "peak will happen". They disagree when doomers give their prediction for what peak oil will mean for society.

Very few doomers have good predictive records (see Kunstler on Y2K, for example), so it should hardly be surprising that they don't always have great luck convincing people to believe their predictions. It's a mistake to confuse that with people refusing to believe in peak oil, though.