There is a pattern in Bab that has not changed since 1985. The same injectors. The same producers. The same constant water rate, day after day, year after year. The water found the fractures early, made highways through the high-permeability streaks, and never looked back. Now the producers run 80 percent water cut, the injectors pump seawater into what might as well be a drain, and the tight matrix between the fractures—where perhaps half the remaining oil still sits—has barely been touched. This is not waterflooding failure. It is waterflooding settling. A stable, inefficient equilibrium where viscous forces dominate, capillary forces are starved, and the ...