TULSA, Okla. -- A major campaign of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in offshore fields will be crucial for sustaining the world's future oil supply, according to renowned petroleum consultant Dr. Rafael Sandrea.

Offshore fields have been the main source of growth for world oil production in recent years, as onshore oil output has been essentially flat during the last two decades, he noted. But less than a fourth of the world's ultimate recoverable oil reserves in offshore fields has been produced to date. That opens the door for a big EOR push to extract the remaining technically recoverable oil offshore. Sandrea also contends that EOR is a more cost-effective way to add reserves than is exploration or acquisition.

Sandrea, president of Tulsa, Okla.-based IPC Petroleum Consultants Inc., is the author of a groundbreaking, provocative new multiclient study to be published in May by the Oil & Gas Journal Research Center.

In his multiclient study, Future Oil & Gas Supply: A Quantitative Analysis, Dr. Sandrea employs a unique, proprietary methodology to provide a holistic assessment of the global oil and natural gas resource base, with the view to evaluate its potential production capacity over the medium and long term. He employs a novel approach that has long informed his exclusive services as an advisor to governments and intergovernmental bodies and as a consultant to major oil companies and the world's leading investment bankers and other financial institutions on matters of risk analysis for international upstream petroleum investments and appraisal of global oil and gas reserves and resources.