The growing demand for petroleum resources, and the ever-increasing economic pressure to produce these resources at minimum cost, create a formidable challenge in the coming decade to look hard at currently used economic guidelines and success rates so that the petroleum industry as a whole may emerge from the 1970s in the strongest position it has ever enjoyed. Much has been said and written in the past decade about methods of calculating economic parameters for evaluating both wildcat and development wells, but the industry has missed perhaps the most significant aspect of the economic approach, that of improving the chances for success by more efficient drainage of reservoirs. Most currently used systems are based on results, empirically derived, from past performance. These by necessity normally include some rather broad assumptions. It is the purpose of this paper to direct attention to some ways in which our basic approach to the actual search for hydrocarbons might be altered to achieve the desired economic return by increasing the per well recovery.

Although there will undoubtedly be vast improvement in technique in the coming 10 years, the technology is already at hand which, if properly applied, should produce some rather dramatic results in the relatively near future enabling us more efficiently to drain "the last drop."

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