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Editor's Note: Leonardo Maugeri is group senior vice president for corporate strategies and planning at the Italian energy company ENI as well as the author of the forthcoming book The Age of Oil: The Mythology, History and Future of the World's Most Controversial Resource.

In this article, a rough draft of which appears below, Maugeri points out that Earth does, in fact, hold a lot more oil beneath its surface than most people think, and the key to tapping that crude is the development of new technologies.

What is your reaction to Maugeri's assertion that "most of the planet’s known resources are left unexploited in the ground, and even more await to be discovered," which seems counterintuitive given the view by many experts that we have already reached "peak oil" and that today's focus should be on new sources of renewable energy?

Does Maugeri present a persuasive case that "the difficult oil of today will be tomorrow's easy oil, thanks to the learning curve of technology expertise"?

What are your thoughts on the author's estimation that the world has enough oil for the rest of the 21st century?

What other oil extraction technologies might Maugeri want to consider addressing?

What effect will the state of the economy have on Maugeri's observations and predictions? Would a look at this same issue a year from now likely yield very different results?

Your feedback will be considered by the writer and editors as they complete the final draft of this article, which will appear in an upcoming edition of Scientific American magazine.

On 20 dry, flat square miles of California’s Central Valley, more than 8,000 horseheads—as old-fashioned oilmen call them—slowly rise and fall as they suck oil from underground. Glittering pipelines crossing the whole area reveal that the place is not merely a relic of the past. But even to an expert’s eyes, Kern River Oil Field betrays no hint of the miracle that has enabled it to survive decades of dire predictions.

Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, and initially it was thought that only 10 percent of its heavy, viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil. As pointed out in 1995 by Morris Adelman, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the few remaining energy gurus, “in the next forty-four years, it produced not 54 million barrels but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining.” But even this estimate was wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today, Kern River still puts out more than 80,000 barrels per day, and Chevron reckons that the remaining reserves are about 480 million barrels.

Chevron began to achieve its miracle in the 1960s by injecting steam into the ground, a novel technology at the time. Later, a new breed of exploration and drilling tools—along with steady steam injection—turned the field into a sort of oil cornucopia. Yet, Kern River is not an isolated case. Most of the world’s oilfields have revived over time. New exploration methods have revealed more of the Earth’s secrets. And leaps in extraction technology have led to tapping oil in once-inaccessible areas and in places where drilling was once uneconomic. In a way, technology is the real cornucopia.