The oil industry generally isn't very innovative, nor do they tend to test costly, untried technologies on their assets that already make billions of dollars.

The oil industry generally isn't very innovative, nor do they tend to test costly, untried technologies on their assets that already make billions of dollars. Take water injection for instance, which is a standard method for maintaining reservoir pressure, ie. the pumping of water into the oil/gas reservoir to raise the pressure. In order to implement such a scheme, a well slot would be needed for the source water pump, and at least one other well slot for the injection well. Typically, these are done on separate water injection platforms. Add the cost of the workover drill rig to drill the wells and the increased cost of water/oil separation on the production platform, and it's a very expensive exercise... especially if it may not actually work (which is what is implied in the article with water injection in chalk reservoirs, which could potentially cause reservoir fracturing). An oil company, especially a relatively new one like Statoil in the 70s/80s, would be justified to balk at costly experimentation with their fields, and would probably wait for others to prove the concept first. This is even more justifiable when the field is gigantic (like the Ekofisk field). Oftentimes, cutting edge technologies are used on smaller, marginal fields with relatively high lift prices, and where oil price volatility is the difference between profit and loss (I worked on a project in 2002/3 when oil was around $25 a barrel and this field was only profitable at a price of $30 per barrel... the field actually needed water injection right from first oil, which means that it was definitely marginal... so they were lucky when oil prices shot past $100). In any case, you don't see much innovation happening in the huge saudi fields that have very low lift prices.